Stephen Billing’s Blog

I am co-authoring a paper for publication in a learned journal with my colleague, Margaret Miller, who is many time zones away in Virginia, USA. We have a weekly phone call at which we discuss the paper and what is going on in our lives.

Margaret has eagle eyes for detail and noticed that in the fine print it says that we have to get permission from every single author whom we have directly quoted in the article. That’s what it sounds like, anyway. What a world! Some of the authors we have quoted are ‘no longer with us,’ so this will be difficult!

I would have thought that the authors would be pleased to get citations because one of the ways the success of one’s publications is measured is by the number of citations received. This approach is very different from the blog world which makes it easy for people to link to each other and cite each other’s work.

For this journal, it sounds like a very time consuming process to quote the work of others, and I am certainly not inclined to spend months waiting for responses. So we are just going to paraphrase the quotes instead, which we are apparently allowed to do.

No doubt there is a good reason for this requirement. I wonder what it is.

I have just had the opportunity of peer reviewing a journal article for a learned academic journal. The idea of the peer review is that by passing the test of running the proposed article past some anonymous reviewers, the journal can expect to be able to publish articles that meet minimum criteria for being worth of academic publication.

It’s a kind of rite of passage for acceptance into the club of published authors – the authors get kudos for publishing in peer-reviewed journals. I am currently preparing an article for publication myself.

The article I just reviewed was unformed, unfinished and did not articulate ideas that seemed very useful. It purported to be explaining complexity theory but seemed to be unclear about basic concepts of emergence and was very mechanistic in its constructs which were all in the service of managing and controlling the emergence of desired behaviours.  And yet, by definition, emergence cannot be controlled or predicted.

Why should you care? Well, we can read published material that sounds quite plausible. Because it’s been written on the printed page or on a website seems to give it more weight somehow. I expected that because it had been submitted for review by a learned journal the article would have something useful or interesting to say. Somehow I could not find the usefulness or meaning in the article. Very disappointing. 

I am reminded that just because it has been written down does not make it true. Even if an editor agreed to publish it.

So question what you read, including this!