Thursday 29th April 2016 - Keeping reviewers sweet

I don't know how many referees' reports I have written over the years on manuscripts submitted for possible journal publication.  I suspect it runs to well over a hundred.  Sometimes I turn requests down because I already have a couple of manuscripts in my in-tray.  I always endeavour to keep to deadlines set - but that may result in journal editors seeing me as a reliable reviewer and sending me more manuscripts to consider.

But one of the frustrating things about reviewing for many journals is not knowing what the editors' decision then is.  I can say that a paper is unpublishable, and then a year later I see that it has appeared completely unchanged from the appalling version I had been sent - and with no word back to me from the editor as to why.  Journals which I don't normally read sometimes send manuscripts which I spend some time on, making detailed suggestions for improvements, and then I hear nothing. Sometimes it's only years later that I find out that the article, revised along the lines I suggested, did appear - and I feel rather pleased that I played a role in improving it.  I'm not looking for a mention or acknowledgement - but it would have been nice if the editors had told me, or had even sent me an offprint of the article.

Reviewers are unsung heroes of the peer review system, taking on significant tasks, often spending considerable time and effort on them, and getting nothing back.  Indeed, we are often kept in ignorance of the decision-making process that the editors have gone through on the basis of the reviews they receive.

It would be very easy to send out a brief message telling us what is going to happen to the articles we have considered - and if they are published to send us an offprint so we can refer to the article (it would benefit its citation count and therefore be in the authors' interest).  But a nice thing happened to me this morning.  I received a message from a journal indicating the outcome of the editors' deliberations on a manuscript that I had scratched my head about and finally decided was not redeemable.  It is nice to have confirmation that they had endorsed my view (and presumably that of the other reviewers).  It brings that one to a close.  And I will be very happy to review for that journal again in the future.  On to the next manuscript.  

Friday 22nd April 2016 - How it began, and the changes since

I pulled off the southbound M1 into Newport Pagnell Services and sought out a telephone box.  I had been told to ring between 3 and 4 and it was now close to the latter time.  I was sure what the answer would be.  But when I was put through to the Head of Department he told me that after my interview that morning I was the preferred candidate and was being offered the post of Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Sheffield. It was February 1974.

Yesterday I attended the funeral of that Head of Department - Stan Gregory - who died earlier this month at the age of 90. Indeed he had celebrated his 90th birthday a few weeks earlier by taking a trip from his cruise ship to visit the site of the Palace of the Queen of Sheba in Oman.  Shortly after his return home he suffered a stroke: he did not then suffer for long.

I have spent some time preparing materials for an obituary that will, I hope, run in a significant news outlet in a week or two's time.  And what that has led me to reflect on is the narrowing down of what academics might now be expected to achieve.  Stan perhaps was exceptional, but there were aspects of his career that were not so unusual at that time but which would not be commonplace today.

One thing that has gone is the closeness of the connections between academics in universities and the world of schoolteachers.  When I first started my university career a number of colleagues sat on A or even O level examining boards, and many marked school exam scripts.  A colleague recently participated in a group devising a new curriculum for Geography A levels, but no university staff member I know of now marks school scripts.  Stan was on the Joint Matriculation Board, run by a set of northern universities, and also took a leading role in the schoolteachers' association for the discipline - even becoming President of that. By then he had already been President of the research body of university academics in Geography.  Combining leading roles at both these levels in a discipline is, I would suggest, unthinkable today.  Despite the mass of widening participation initiatives and outreach activities undertaken, it is now almost unheard of for any senior university figure to become as immersed in school activities within his or her discipline as Stan was.

Another thing that I observed in Stan's CV was the fact that he had been involved in supporting the early steps of a number of institutions in Commonwealth countries towards the setting up of departments - or in progressing towards university status itself.  He had spent a year in Sierra Leone as a young lecturer, plus multiple visits to Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Jamaica and elsewhere.  There may of course be less need for such support today.  But I'm not sure whether the pressure for the delivery of publications and impact statements for the Research Evaluation Framework permits academics to get involved in these sorts of overseas activities anyway.

Stan's career combined many facets.  In addition to being President of both the Institute of British Geographers (the research arm) and the Geographical Association (the schools arm) he also took a presiding role in the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  He was the founder of a journal.  He took part in the revolution that brought quantification to Geography, and wrote the first undergraduate textbook on statistical methods in the discipline.  He served as Dean of the Faculty for 2 years, and as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor for 4 years at a time of student unrest in the early 1980s.  And he then retired early at the age of 62.

Each of his achievements was significant - but to achieve them all was remarkable.  But for someone whose academic career started in the 1950s the range was not so unusual.  It gave him, and others of his generation, a breadth of experience across a wide variety of aspects of education and research - and at a global scale.  Most academic careers today have become more specialised.  And we may have lost some of the scope for connectivity that the earlier breadth gave our predecessors.  

I was surprised by the outcome of my telephone call to Stan in 1974, but I was fortunate as well.  His was a good example to try to follow in some small way, but the circumstances in which he developed his career have changed since he became 'the complete academic'.