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<DIV>I know this debate has died down some and I'm not really trying to kick it
up again, but another thought occurred to me:</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>As EiC I try to attend as many conferences as possible where potential
authors are presenting, primarily to meet them and offer guidance early.
This takes time and is expensive. Due to the past recession and
falling academic budgets I'm seeing senior level researchers being more
particular on where they attend, perhaps this is also a contributor to weaker
submission papers as junior researchers are not getting the early feedback we
need to give them. Everyone focuses on attending ICIS but so few get to
present and those that do are usually not that junior and not the ones learning
to conduct research.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I know my ability to attend smaller conferences with better author
interaction has diminished, I've heard this from many other colleagues.
I've also observed that institutions are reserving travel funds for those
needing to get tenure/promotion and having less to senior level travel (I do
understand the expectation of getting grants and such to support senior level
travel, but that has been cut down also).</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Perhaps the review issue is not on the back end of reviewing submissions,
but rather at the front end of providing input and feedback during the
early presentation phase of research? The traditional model is do
research, write a conference paper, submit it for review, if accepted present,
get feedback during presentation, then do the journal submission.
This means papers have had a review cycle and a feedback session before the
journal submission is made. This means the journal submission is usually
in pretty good shape.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I also serve as a track chair at HICSS and usually a minitrack chair at
AMCIS as well as support other conferences as possible. I understand the
difficulty of getting reviewers for conferences, especially with the explosion
in the number of conferences. I also have a problem with authors who
submit to a conference but won't agree to review for the conference. I
understand there may be some conflict of interest here but authors need to
understand that the job of improving others work is also their
responsibility. A couple more observations: conferences are becoming less
inclusive as acceptance rates need to drop to make sure deans see the
conference as a quality conference, and in those conferences that are more
inclusive (like AMCIS) session attendance is not very good, sessions are
smaller with less feedback as more papers are crammed in with less presentation
time. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>A note to authors, you don't have to present all the detail in these
presentations, getting feedback is more important than presenting the depth
of your paper, give us enough to discuss it, your paper will improve.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I don't have solutions for all this, just observations that perhaps its
time we start thinking of the total research process, from inception through
conference presentation to finally journal submission. Perhaps we are
shorting this traditional approach and this is why there are feelings that
research isn't as good or reviewers aren't as good. I do think we need to
give more earned credit for reviewing, be it at conferences or for journals. It
is not sufficient to say that is the responsibility of senior researchers to do
this. It is not sufficient to say that we don't want the poor reviewers to
not review, this only puts the burden on those that put the effort into good
reviews. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Any solutions?....murray e. jennex</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 10/15/2013 5:47:52 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
MurphJen@aol.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
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<DIV>I'm not sure what the point of the below is but I'll add my perception as
a journal editor in chief. Quite frankly authors are lucky to get
reviews. I have seen a flood of submissions the last 2 years from all
parts of the world where before I saw mostly US and European
submissions. I think this is good but, there are a lot of junior level
papers and not enough senior level reviewers to go around. The trend I
do not like is that of authors feeling it is their right to get their reviews
quick. I'm not sure if this is an output of the open source journals
that have promised fast turnarounds, but to get quality reviews takes time as
there simply aren't enough quality reviewers who have the time to be almost
full time reviewers. My gripe (and I admit it is as an EiC) is that it
seems everyone wants/has to author papers and few have the desire/time to
review. Also, unfortunately, new authors don't seem to understand the
concept of a thorough literature review and seem to have taken the debate on
the ethics of recommending papers from the journal being submitted to, or
of previous papers from senior reviewers as license to ignore
them. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>This leads to my major question: Why should a journal spend limited
reviewing resources on doing thorough reviews of papers that do not meet the
basic standard of scholarly research by grounding themselves in the
literature.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I am tired of the excuse that the authors do not have access to the
articles so they ignore them. I see so much research that authors
consider new but is at best a minor extension of something that has been
published but the authors did not or could not get the article to know
it.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I think we are at a crossroads of scholarly literature. We argue
about plagiarism but I think we are seeing a greater issue of authors not
looking at the literature so that they can make the claim "there is little
research" or that "this is new" as a justification for their paper.
To give credit we have to recognize the research that has been done, to build
a body of knowledge we have to build on what has been done, not do it over and
over again.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>If authors want quality reviews they need to show the respect to the
senior scholars by at least looking at their work and building on it rather
than trying to waste their time by making them tell them what literature to
look at rather than addressing the quality of the paper.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Also, I propose that we establish a new ethic: authors can only submit if
they serve as reviewers. I am also tired of hearing the cries of needing
to get published to get tenure or promotion so they don't have time to
review. We need all universities to start recognizing the intellectual
contribution of reviewing as being on equal or near equal par with
authoring. Do this and we will all have quality reviews.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>sorry to rant but you can see this has touched a nerve that has been
throbbing for a while.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Murray E. Jennex, Professor of MIS, San Diego State University</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 10/15/2013 5:05:48 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
mmora@securenym.net writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>Dear
colleagues,<BR>In past weeks, a strong and relevant debate on the academic
influence<BR>of ISI listed journals was discussed in this forum. Well, on
same ideas<BR>I wonder whether there are studies on the quality of the
reviewers (e.g.<BR>level of seniority, level of expertise in the topic,
level of expertise<BR>on research methods, and in particular on the role
played as peers<BR>seeking to improve the advance of science and suggesting
clear insights<BR>rather some simple elaborations of flaws without any
rational justification).<BR>In summary, are we living in a spiral of hard
reviewers and bad researchers?<BR>or rather the opposite one is the reality?
I am sure that Senior researchers<BR>will have reviewed rare reviews from
people with less expertise and seniority<BR>level, so comments on it are
welcome ! Of course, this non ethical practice<BR>should be eliminated. As a
funny real history, a Mexican top researcher<BR>in Education received a
strong critique on the null value of paper that<BR>he wrote, and the
suggestion was to use some papers writen by him in the<BR>past (of course,
the reviewers did know it). I know of other cases similar<BR>cases. Well,
sciences is about truthness but wrong reviews maybe are now a<BR>real
headache ! Cheers !<BR>Manuel Mora<BR>ACM Senior
Member<BR><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>AISWorld
mailing
list<BR>AISWorld@lists.aisnet.org<BR></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></FONT><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>AISWorld
mailing
list<BR>AISWorld@lists.aisnet.org</FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>