Where Can Stanford Grad Students Get Peer Review

Folks:

The posting below looks at the interesting notion of whether or not it is actually a good thing for graduate students to publish.  Information technology is past Colleen Flaherty and it appeared in the Baronial 23, 2017 result ofInside Higher Ed, an fantabulous - and complimentary - online source for news, opinion, and jobs for all of higher education. Y'all can subscribe by going to:  http://insidehighered.com/. Besides, for a free daily update fromInside Higher Ed, due east-mail <scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com>. Copyright ©2017Within Higher Ed. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis

reis@stanford.edu

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Should Grad Students Publish?

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Doctorate, publication(s), postdoctoral fellowship, instruction feel: the listing of common qualifications for a tenure-rails academic job gets longer all the fourth dimension.

Recently, though, the question of whether graduate students should be expected to publish has come up in 2 very unlike disciplines, renewing debate on the topic. While bans past journals on graduate student authors take some supporters, critics of so-called gatekeeping generally agree that information technology'south a Band-Aid for larger structural problems within academe.

"In the by several years, the convention in philosophy of waiting to publish until after the Ph.D. has broken down," J. David Velleman, a professor of philosophy at New York University, wrote in a guest post for the philosophy blog Daily Nous. "Graduate students now believe that they must publish in order to go a job, and most of them are right."

The development, Velleman said, "is having many deleterious furnishings." The book of article submissions has "exploded," to the tune of 500 to 600 per year to a single periodical, he wrote, and attending to each submission has declined proportionately. In turn, he said, academics are less willing to take risks on papers that might not immediately catch editors' attending, leading to more "formulaic papers on condom topics." Assistant professors are also in the "untenable position" of having to compete for periodical space with graduate students if they want to be promoted, he said.

Graduate programs too experience the furnishings of the "publication emergency," Velleman said, in that they'll disfavor admitting students from outside fields who might not exist able to start thinking well-nigh publishing right away. All students volition experiment less with subdisciplines, in the interest of publishing, he added.

The overall effect? "Philosophers will become narrower and narrower -- well qualified, perhaps, to run the narrowed publication maze, but unequipped to open new frontiers in the subject."

Proposed Ban on Graduate Student Authors

To halt what he called "the artillery race in graduate-student publication," Velleman proposed two major policy changes: philosophy journals should refuse to publish work by graduate students, and philosophy departments should disbelieve graduate student work in tenure and promotion reviews.

Anticipating criticism that some graduate student work is as good as any professor's, Velleman wrote that if the piece of work "is that good today, it will be even better in a few years," and the author -- and the literature -- volition benefit from the wait.

Velleman made clear that he was non speaking as a journal editor, but he does know the ins and outs of publication as an editor of Philosophers' Imprint. And he guessed that journal editors would jump at the chance to cut their workload.

Publication, he said, "is non a right."

Velleman wasn't pointing out a new problem with publication in the humanities. Last twelvemonth, for example, Neil Sinhababu, associate professor of philosophy at National University of Singapore, estimated in a widely read Daily Nous guest mail service that approximately ten,000 philosophy papers compete for only 2,000 journal slots each year.

Sinhababu, though, proposed creating more journal space -- not blocking graduate students from publishing. Velleman's much more than drastic proposal attracted hundreds of comments and other strong reactions from inside and outside philosophy.

"As a graduate student non going to NYU, without a single publication, how do I distinguish myself?" wrote 1 commenter. "What should postdoc and job committees rely on? Letters? Other than publications virtually all other indications bespeak purely at the reputation of the school yous came from. Publications are supposed to be the not bad leveler." (The student instead suggested an idea discussed in a tertiary Daily Nous postal service past Jennifer Whiting, a professor of philosophy at the Academy of Pittsburgh: have personnel committees evaluate only a certain number of pages of an academic's best work, to encourage quality in publishing over quantity.)

Other critics were more edgeless.

"What the everlasting f… is this nonsense?" Karen Kelsky, the academic career consultant and former tenured professor behind the blog The Professor Is In, wrote on Facebook. "This is #NotTheOnion."

Doubting that in that location are any current assistant professors who earned their Ph.D.s before what she called the "publication imperative," Kelsky mocked the idea that publication -- non a famine of tenure-track jobs -- is philosophy'south "emergency."

Kelsky said this week that she disagrees with some journal and conference policies limiting submissions from graduate students because "if the piece of work is good, it should exist published" or presented. Moreover, she said, graduate students haven't had "a hope" on the academic chore marketplace within the past two decades without a peer-reviewed publication record, and they should thus "be supported in this longstanding professional imperative, non blocked."

Tenured "gatekeepers" trying to police force graduate students' publishing chances "is really not a good look," she added.

Elliott Shore, executive director of the Association of Enquiry Libraries, also referred to proposals against graduate student publishing as "gatekeeping." Shore said he'd never heard of a hard policy against Ph.D. candidates publishing but didn't rule out there existence unwritten traditions against it. And given the "country of the conversation virtually the hereafter of higher educational activity," especially in the humanities, he only speculated, some professors "might run into their ain students every bit rivals."

Via email, Velleman stuck to his argument, which he said was specific to philosophy. Because philosophy is not studied in high schoolhouse in the U.Southward., he said, undergraduates tend to take their start grade in it only well into their studies. And while many of the greatest 20th-century philosophers actually majored in other fields, he said, admissions to Ph.D. programs in philosophy accept since go "so competitive that only precociously professionalized applicants are accepted. That trend will only advance in one case graduate programs have to restrict their admissions to applicants who will be ready to publish in 3 or four years (every bit they will have to in club to ensure that they tin place their graduates in academic jobs)."

The Instance Against Gatekeeping

Many of Velleman's arguments would employ to other humanities fields. But the graduate student publishing argue is playing out in the natural sciences, every bit well, as highlighted by a contempo postal service by Neuroskeptic, a popular blogger for Discover magazine.

In the post, Neuroskeptic recalls being surprised that a new Journal of Neuroscience paper on statistical power in neuroscience hadn't instead appeared in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. A little sleuthing revealed a backstory, according to the mail: the paper's senior author, Jonathan Rosier, a professor of neuroscience at University College of London, had publicly said that he and his research group were blocked from publishing in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Why? In role because the paper'due south atomic number 82 author, Camilla Nord, was withal a Ph.D. candidate, Rosier said.

Spokespeople for Nature told Neuroskeptic and Inside Higher Ed the same thing: that there is no policy against graduate student authors.

In any case, is such a policy reasonable? Neuroskeptic asked. "I don't recollect so, although I can see why [Reviews] might have establish it attractive. Yous see, Ph.D. students accept a habit of writing review papers. This is because most students have to write a literature review, which serves every bit the introduction to their Ph.D. thesis, and this cloth can easily exist converted into a review paper. These reviews are generally not overly insightful."

If that'southward so, "it's understandable, but still unfair," Neuroskeptic wrote. "It'due south the job of a journal to judge submissions on their merits. Too, if this was what happened, Nord et al.'s paper should have been a clear exception to the rule, every bit it wasn't a literature review merely rather a meta-analysis."

Similar the humanities, the natural sciences are experiencing a publication explosion, with some negative implications for research quality. Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State Academy, wrote a cavalcade last year for Nature, for example, imploring swain scientists to "publish less, and less often" -- lest scientific discipline's reproducibility problem grow.

"Mainstream scientific leaders increasingly have that large bodies of published enquiry are unreliable," he wrote. "Only what seems to accept escaped general notice is a subversive feedback between the production of poor-quality science, the responsibleness to cite previous work and the compulsion to publish."

But who should acquit the career risks of publishing less, and less often? Responding to Sarewitz'southward post, Gary McDowell, executive managing director of the Future of Research, and his colleague, Jessica Polka, wrote in Nature that in today's "competitive arena, request this of scientists -- particularly junior ones -- is to ask them to fall on their swords."

Publishing less, they said, "is not a feasible or responsible mode to better data quality. This would be ameliorate accomplished by increasing the transparency of peer review and by introducing alternative metrics as indicators of reproducibility. Science'due south goal is to share as much information as possible -- not to withhold information technology."

McDowell said last week that "if you're an adept in your field and your submission merits publication, then information technology shouldn't affair what rank you are." To say otherwise, he said, echoing Kelsky and Shore, "is but gatekeeping."

While McDowell admitted that submission volume is frustrating (he nonetheless noted that the concept of "information overload" dates back to artifact), he said more trainees necessarily means more publications.

"If yous desire fewer trainees publishing papers, either have fewer of them, or stop measuring them on publications," and so that they publish merely what advances the question under consideration, and non their careers, he said.

At the same time, McDowell added, negative studies and small data sets that don't get published may exist relevant to someone else'due south piece of work, "so we should actually exist publishing more than of what we exercise, not less, and finding ways of curating that information more effectively."

Quality, Not Quantity

Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the Academy of Maryland at College Park, said he'd never heard of a journal policy against graduate pupil authors. There'southward still a lot that is incorrect with academic publishing, even so, he said, "including the pressure to publish more in order to become jobs or go promoted, and the proliferation of academic journals" -- all of which has "rolled downhill onto graduate students."

In sociology, he said, 1 result is the serious trouble of "salami slicing." That's researchers producing the narrowest possible publishable unit of work, "to maximize the number of CV lines, rather than produce fewer works that are more comprehensive, more important and more useful to the field."

The solution, though, is non to impose "status requirements" on publications, Cohen said. That would only "reify our already unhealthy obsession with status hierarchy, which is already besides often used as an alternative to real quality cess."

What instead?

"Let'south just stipulate that anyone can publish annihilation and even publish it in a journal that describes itself as peer reviewed," so a publication doesn't count for anything in and of itself, Cohen said. "And then let's enquire, 'Is this work practiced?' That volition require really reading it and using our expertise to make judgment well-nigh information technology, which is our job."

Read more by Colleen Flaherty

johnsonniguened1968.blogspot.com

Source: https://tomorrowsprofessor.sites.stanford.edu/posting/1598