Misc

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. ...

We recently ran a little study to see what happens when you prevent a small group of students from using their smartphone for 24 hours. Participants were instructed to place their smartphone in a secure evidence bag. So what happened? Well not much really, they missed their smartphone.  As part of this study, we also asked participants to complete the Smartphone 'Addiction' Inventory (SPAI). Interestingly, a few participants who dropped out later in the study had fractionally higher SPAI scores. This may indicate that smartphone ‘addicts’ were unable to fully participate in the study and so discontinued, thus affecting our findings. However, this is unlikely given that smartphone addiction scales  do not align favourably with objective behaviour . It is worth noting that while this small number of participants were slightly more anxious at time 1 they were also on average, a bit happier. It's increasingly difficult to know exactly what these 'addiction...

We recently collected more smartphone usage data to test if pen and paper scales could predict behaviour ( they didn't ). However, in the process we managed to replicate some of our previous results from 2015. Specifically, the average number of smartphone pick-ups per day remains remarkably similar across both samples despite using different software and smartphone operating systems to quantify these behaviours. These results therefore cast some doubt over the idea that Android and iPhone users differ in their usage behaviours ( we previously observed some demographic and personality differences between these two groups ). Mean number of pick-ups from 2015 sample: 84.68 ( SD =55.23) . Mean number of pick-ups from 2018 sample: 85.44 ( SD =53.34) . It's worth remembering that our results in 2015 were already comparable with data collected by others in 2009 ! The idea that people are using their phones more doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.  ...

Having navigated the academic publishing system as an author, reviewer and occasional editor, I can confirm that there are inconsistencies at almost every turn * . From the variable quality of reviews to the procedures in place during article or chapter production, even within the same journal, authors and reviewers can have very different experiences. Previously, I was led to believe that the role of an editor was clear and consistent. Editors read manuscripts, find reviewers, and make key decisions based on reviews and their own expertise. In addition, editors can help guide authors towards what they feel are the most important points that should be addressed following review. This is particularly important when it comes to clarifying the direction of a paper when reviewers express conflicting views. However, a number of editors and associate editors, who are sometimes paid by journals, don't always act in a way that is helpful or fair to authors and reviewers. In many instan...