Express Editing Writing and Research

My last post concerned peer review and its importance in academic publishing, and how some dodgy journals that claim to be peer-reviewed will in fact publish anything  – literally, anything – without any review at all.  But as Will Oremus wrote in “This Is What Happens When No One Proofreads an Academic Paper” (Slate, 11 Nov 2014), even reputable journals sometimes don’t maintain a rigorous peer review process. How this snarky private comment got past the editors, reviewers, typesetters and publishers of Ethology, not to mention the authors of the article, is hard to understand. The lessons – employ a top-notch editor or proofreader, and never insult someone in digital media or print unless you’re happy for it to become public!

Publishing is a crucial part of a scientist’s job. It allows others to evaluate your findings, try to replicate them, argue against them, incorporate them into their own work. It’s also a vital indicator of the worth of the research; the best work generally gets published in high-ranking journals and attracts citations, and these metrics are used in awarding the grants and promotions that keep research going. The top journals reject most of the manuscripts they receive and send the rest to experts to criticise (sometimes constructively), pan or even approve. This peer review process is supposed to ensure that the journal contains only well-conducted, ethical and useful research.

Inevitably, the pressure to publish has several downsides. One is the advent of dodgy journals that, for a price, will publish just about anything.  They’re often full of manuscripts that have been bounced down the journal hierarchy, but on which the authors have spent too much time to abandon entirely; the rest is rubbish. Some of these journals have plausible-sounding names and websites that give an impression of quality. All actively tout for papers, sending emails (often personalised) seeking submissions to special journal  issues cunningly tailored to your interests. These are predatory journals; at best they’re an annoying waste of time, at worst a scam.

Peter Vamplew (Federation University Australia) had clearly had enough of these emails, particularly those from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. He submitted a paper (originally created by David Mazieres of Stanford and Eddie Kohler of Harvard in 2005) containing the phrase “Get me off your fucking mailing list” 863 times. A return email said the IJACT‘s reviewers had given the paper an “excellent” rating, and offered publication for $150. Funny, but a bit sad too. Read Stephen Luntz‘s blog on the story here.

Many people have trouble with punctuation. The apostrophe is undoubtedly the most misunderstood and misused of all forms of punctuation (as the image below demonstrates – a rare example of two unnecessary apostrophes in one word!), but the semicolon is probably next. Anna Heyward’s article ‘Ugly, Ugly as a Tick on a Dog’s Belly’ (Meanjin, September 2014) traces the history of the semicolon, concluding (as you’ll have gathered from her title) that the semicolon is ultimately an aesthetic aberration and of little use.

Snapped at Anglesea, New Years Day 2013

In March 2013 Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology in which they argued that people who reject climate science are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Their conclusion was based on analysis of the denialist blogosphere’s response to their own previous study which found conspiracist ideation to be linked to rejection of climate science as well as the relationships between lung cancer and smoking and between HIV and AIDS. (These authors have another paper in press titled “NASA faked the moon landing, therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science”.)

Threats of litigation started arriving soon after the article was published. In response, the journal launched a scientific, ethical and legal investigation that concluded the article was sound. Nonetheless, on the 21^st of March 2014, Frontiers in Psychology retracted it as a direct result of the threats. Although the article can still be viewed on the University of Western Australia’s website, this episode shows how the threat of legal action can drastically curtail academic freedom.

*This is an edited version of an article by Elaine McKewon (Research Associate, Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney) published in The Conversation on the 2^nd of April 2014.

Need your own article or thesis edited? I can help!

Campbell Aitken

Dunning et al. [1] showed that incompetent people tend to be blissfully ignorant of their incompetence (the Dunning-Kruger effect), lacking both the ability to produce correct responses and the expertise to identify their problems. Incompetent people base their perceptions of performance partly on their own inflated opinions of their skills.

Students must satisfy objective criteria to enter university, and academics are appointed and promoted on merit, so in theory incompetence should be rare in higher education. Of course, in reality many students and academics are very good at some components of their work and not so good at others. Academics in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) disciplines can be highly technically skilled but communicate poorly. Thankfully (from my perspective), most academics with deficient writing abilities (sometimes due to dyslexia, or having English as a second language) are well aware of it and will employ a professional editor to tidy up their work. Nevertheless, I occasionally encounter students and academics who exhibit all the signs of the Dunning-Kruger effect and truly believe their thesis or paper is excellent and requires only minor proofreading rather than a full-blown edit.

Few writers can edit their own work effectively, and I think this is particularly true of academics. This is because they spend a long time thinking about their research, planning, generating or collecting and analysing data and so on, so by the time they come to write about their work for publication their perspective on it can be quite narrow and/or skewed. Papers derived from the hothouse of a PhD thesis are especially vulnerable. A second pair of eyes, especially if belonging to someone not intimately connected with the research, can often be invaluable in picking up breaks in logical flow, insufficient explanations of content, inconsistencies and simple omissions of words. That’s my job!

Reference

[1] Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger & Kruger, Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence, Current Directions in Psychological Science 2003, vol. 12, no. 3, 83-87

Campbell Aitken

In many respects academics have it pretty good: they work on topics about which they’re passionate, have a lot of flexibility and freedom, interact with smart and interesting people every day, and are paid well by most people’s standards. Nevertheless, there are downsides, notably constant grant-writing to compete for scarce research funds, and the extraordinary amount of (over)work required to plant and maintain a footing on the fellowship ladder.

Some people thrive on the pressures of academia, but many wilt. In the UK, mental health problems are on the rise among university academics. According to Claire Shaw and Lucy Ward’s story in theguardian.com (6 March 2014) research indicates nearly half of UK academics have symptoms of psychological distress.

Campbell Aitken

This story from theguardian.com (26^th February 2014) begins as follows:

Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science.

I struggle with this concept. Certainly, dodgy conferences and journals exist: I receive at least one email a week from someone asking me to chair a session at a plausible-sounding meeting or submit an article to a special journal issue on a topic of my choice, always with a profit motive. However, my institution is heavily reliant upon highly competitive research funding and runs on a shoestring, so is extremely careful about approving expensive conference travel. Our plane-happy senior researchers choose their meetings very carefully; they don’t have time to attend worthless meetings. Meanwhile, junior researchers compete for a few conference scholarships, which are awarded to those who will present the best research at the best conferences. I don’t know who is paying those “hefty, till-ringing registration fees” to attend dodgy conferences, but it’s certainly not anyone from the Burnet Institute, and I’m confident that very few other Australian research institutions are.

Similarly, I’ve paid to have only two manuscripts published in journals over the past 25 years, both times because the journal was a prestigious one (and happened to apply printing charges – few do) and the manuscripts described the most important aspects of those research projects. Why would anyone pay to publish decent work in a low-impact (or no-impact, if really dodgy) journal which wouldn’t get them any meaningful coverage or kudos in their discipline? Moreover, I had to revise each manuscript extensively to comply with very insightful and comprehensive comments from reviewers – hardly the kind of “prompt acceptance” described in the Guardian story.

Campbell Aitken

Morwell’s air is extremely unhealthy right now (28th February 2014) due to the continuing fire in the Hazelwood coalmine. About an hour ago, Rosemary Lester, Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, advised “anyone over 65, pre-school-aged children, pregnant women and anyone with a pre-existing lung condition living or working in Morwell South to relocate” (ABC News).

The concentration of PM2.5 particulates (airborne particulates 2.5 micrometres or less in diameter) reached 280 micrograms per cubic metre in Morwell South yesterday – more than 11 times the World Health Organisation’s safety threshold. These particles penetrate deeply into the respiratory system and have been linked with increased rates of mortality, heart attacks and lung cancer.

Most unpleasant. Nevertheless, spare a thought for Beijing and its surrounding provinces, currently smothered in smog containing PM2.5 particles at 505 micrograms per cubic metre. Scientists say China’s toxic air pollution resembles nuclear winter, and is now impeding photosynthesis and threatening the country’s food supply. One can only hope that the pollution’s economic toll – due to flights grounded, highways closed, increased morbidity and mortality, and many fewer tourists – will force authorities to act. Read more in Jonathan Kaiman’s story in theguardian.com (Wednesday 26 February 2014).

Campbell Aitken

My family loves great cheese and high-quality food in general, and consequently we’ve always pooh-poohed low-fat products – mostly because many such foods are highly processed and stuffed full of sugar or artificial sweeteners to compensate for their reduced fat content. Recent research appears to back up our dislike of low-fat products with evidence that they don’t achieve what they’re supposed to. A study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care shows that middle-aged men who consumed high-fat dairy products were much less likely to become obese than men who never or rarely ate them, and a meta-analysis of 16 observational studies published in the European Journal of Nutrition found that high-fat dairy was associated with a lower risk of obesity. Something else to celebrate with cheese!

Evidence is crucial to academic writing. Every statement presented as fact should be substantiated with a citation, and citations are given in full as references (for a journal article, typically author(s), year of publication, article title, journal name, volume and issue numbers, and page numbers) after your final thesis chapter or article section. Some people provide a bibliography (most often in a thesis) containing references for everything relevant and useful they read during their research, including everything actually cited, while others give a list of references, which should only contain references for material cited in the manuscript. The latter is far more common, and universally required outside the social sciences and humanities.