Spaced Out :: 11 2006

Some more musings on the role of editors in academic journals as a result of a paper I submitted a paper to the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology last year. In its original form, two reviewers highlighted both the strong and weak aspects of the paper. One suggested it would sit well if re-submitted (and actually noted that the topic was “excellent”. Warm glow!) as a short communication and on this basis the editor recommended a re-write. After six months (yes, I really should have done it sooner) I sat down and shortened the paper, re-submitting it. It then took another six months for the review to be completed before it was finally rejected. What surprised me was that the paper was reviewed from scratch and the original reviewers comments were abandoned, with one of the new reviewers stating it is “not likely to be of interest to the readers” (definitely not a warm glow on that count!).

So what is going on in all of this?? Well, I would normally re-submit a paper, addressing the points raised by the reviewers in an attached letter. An editor would be expected to check that these points had been correctly addressed and then either accept or reject on this basis. For whatever reason, the paper went out for a second review, which was not favourable. Clearly this placed the editor in a difficult position. Two sets of reviews, the first generally positive and the second generally negative. Which are “better”? In the end the paper was rejected but it clearly highlights both the role of the editor in the whole process and, more importantly, the careful selection of referees (something also highlighted by the IJRS article retractions). And it is referees that are both the strong and weak link in the whole review process. You need “experts” in a field of study, but can you find them? Are they expert across the scope of a whole paper? Are they biased? And will they do it?! Ultimately, these things need to be balanced.

I blogged last week about having a reliable backup routine for data on a PC. In this I mentioned that I have five copies of my data, including archives and offsite backup. Whilst it is relatively simple to set up a backup routine to another hard disk drive (internal or external, or indeed both!) using something like Second Copy or Mircosoft’s free SyncToy, offsite backup is a little more complicated. This would traditionally have been performed to a tape, which would have been taken away at night. People have more recently used CDs and DVDs and the new generation of BluRay discs.

There are two problems with this approach; the first one is actually remembering to do it, making sure there is a disc in the drive, and taking it offsite! The second is disc capacity. I have 40Gb of data which wont easily fit on a DVD (and I dont want to be sat at a PC slotting discs in and out).

The simplest method is actually online backup. This ranges from free space at places like Box.net through to the rather neat firefox extension called GSpace that allows you to dump files into free space within a GMail account. Ultimately though these are only of he order of 1-2Gb so suitable for some but not a total solution.

The cheapest of the online storage solutions is Carbonite (ny referral URL), offering unlimited space for $5 a month. This itself is great, but for me its the software the totally sells the solution. Operating as an extension within Windows explorer it simply monitors these directories and automatically backs up your data, compressed and encrypted, to Carbonite. You don’t have to think about it. And once its done the initial upload it simply copies file changes. The restoration of files is painfully simply, again using Windows Explorer to access your remote data and marking files you want to restore. All in all its a brilliant solution that I can heartily recommend.

Following on from my blog about the potential use of EXIF headers in JPEGs, I cam across an extension for Firefox called EXIF Viewer. It does what it says on the tin in that it allows you to view EXIF information for JPEGs. This is an early version so it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

I was putting together a relational database recently that needed to contain a table of references. The references themselves were sat in Endnote so I thought it would be straightforward to export them into something like a CSV or Tab-delimited file. It’s not though!! The “Export” feature doesn’t do what you expect and supports TXT, RTF or XML, exporting using the currently selected output style.

The solution is to create an output style using the (text) format you prefer. I like working with CSV because they are straighforward to manipulate. Whilst a tab-delimited output style is made available as part of Endnote, a CSV is not. So I created a very simple CSV output style to generate a CSV file. With this output style selected you make sure all the references are highlighted and then go to Exprot in the File menu. A new TXT file will be generated that is a CSV and can be dumped straight in to Excel or a database.

Note: I only created the ouput style for “Reports” and “Journals” and, for some strange reason, Endnote wouldnt put a comma after the author field (but did after all the others). I changed this to a * and then did a simple find and replace to put commas back in, in my text editor.

Beinga journal editor, I am concerned about the quality of the articles we publish, but have to balance this against the maintenance of a throughput of appropriate material. Add in to the mix the management of 1 internal reviewer, 1 cartographic reviewer and 2 external reviewers, and it all makes for alot of effort to publish one article.

The whole “quality” issue came starkly in to focus recently with the publication of a “Statement of Retraction” by the International Journal of Remote Sensing. If you read the statement you will see that not one, but three, papers have been retracted from publication (Sidenote: not sure if you can physically retract something that’s already published; I guess it’s more like disowning) where the same (ish) group of authors substantially reproduced material that had already been published (i.e. plagiarised). This really does highlight the whole peer-review process. It’s not perfect by any means, but does provide a good way of assessing the “worthiness” of research. So it is a case of selecting reviewers with care and passing a careful editorial eye over the results. What I find slightly strange is that several of the papers plagiarise were themselves published (earlier) by IJRS. Not quite sure what was going through the minds of the authors….