Misc

I've always found interdisciplinary research rewarding. It also fits with my view that, at least from an applied perspective, no single discipline has all the answers. Probably also says something about my attention span.  Anyway, I'm going to share three things that early-career interdisciplinary researchers in the UK (or who are thinking about working in the UK) might find useful. Somewhat timely as we come to the end of another REF cycle. For those outside the UK, the REF is used to quantify the quality of research outputs across institutions every 7 years or so. It determines how much funding is allocated to each institution by the UK Government.  The below is therefore based on my own and colleagues experiences while conducting interdisciplinary research at research intensive institutions across the UK. 1. Take time to appreciate disciplinary hierarchies because it may impact where you can work in the future. Publication expectations placed on researchers in terms of the ...

Charging $50 to submit a manuscript.  This is another baffling move from a journal that was already heading in the wrong direction for three reasons: (i) Editorials are all over the place. See a recent letter in response to one from last year.  (ii) The editor-in-chief is not an editor. They don't handle manuscripts or communicate with reviewers. Many reviews are definitely not worth $50 (good, bad or neutral)!  (iii) An increasing number of papers have obvious issues with basic reporting, which the journal clearly doesn't care about.  In some areas of finance and accounting, it is common to have submission fees, which are sometimes refunded following acceptance. However, this is not the norm for psychology (nor should it be).  It looks like the publisher has implemented this on the quiet (kudos to Lee Hadlington for noticing) and is presumably an attempt to handle submission loads.  The number of submissions shouldn't come as a huge surprise.  First...

[see updates at the end of this article] I disagree with a fair chunk of Griffiths and co's work theoretically and methodologically. That's science. But Griffithsgate  goes beyond that and raises some uncomfortable questions about editorial bias and the very real consequences of carelessly applied research (see  Dorothy Bishop's  blog and Tom Chiver's  article in  Unheard ). In saying that, it is tricky to separate procedures from science because the rushed nature of the work means that it is riddled with contradictions. Like a political party trying to avoid the opposition, it is almost impossible to debate a moving target. For example:   Write about why data should be open , but don't share your own when requested .  Write about students and issues concerning plagiarism , then do the very same thing . That's all just procedural remember and long before getting to the actual science. I've previously written about the problems of publishing on an ...

I tweeted about a dilemma earlier this week. It's a familiar tale.  In the last few months, I've reviewed 3 papers for the same journal. I am also a co-author of a paper that is under review at the same outlet.   To be completely transparent, our paper has been reviewed as far as I can tell, but it has now spent more time on a desk than with reviewers. A colleague emailed politely asking if the paper would be sent out for review in Feb after it sat for a month with no activity. I emailed again asking for an update on our paper earlier this month. The journal office claims to forward emails on, but we receive zero response from any editor.  What do you do? The problem with not reviewing is that I am not helping authors who deserve to have their paper reviewed in a timely fashion. On a side note, the very same journal also has a habit of giving reviewers a set number of days to complete a review and then cancelling the review before the due date.  And then they wo...

Writing academic books has become somewhat less fashionable in psychology, but I’ve always been encouraged to do things I genuinely want to do rather than be completely guided by the REF, TEF or KEF etc. That advice has always stuck with me.  The book is now almost finished pending some minor edits and a bit of copyediting. I am aware that a few early versions of the manuscript have gone out to some folk who might say something nice for the back cover. Pretty much all the content is new and, I hope, as up-to-date as a book can be. Some of it naturally pulls ideas from a handful of recent papers. On a side note, it's been an interesting experience to wrestle permissions from publishers so I can re-use portions of text or figures from my own papers! Publication is penned for later this year ( update September 2020: you can buy it now) , but in the meantime here are three general things that have stuck with me throughout the course of putting it together. ...