thanks to Carmen for pointing me to this video on Fark.
this question bubbles up in my mind weekly as i peruse tables of contents of info sci/lib sci journals. these kind of “how we did it good at my library” articles describe a problem identified at one library, recount what was done to resolve the problem, and then summarize. there is often no mention of how what was done to resolve the problem may relate to a wider body of literature and often doesn’t offer how their resolution may be implemented at other libraries. when i see this kind of publication in a peer-reviewed journal, mixed in with research articles, i’m stumped.
“peer review” to me means that a small group of topic experts reads a manuscript, situates it within the literature of the topic they know, and then decides whether it is an original enough contribution to add to the field of knowledge (i know the process is more complex. i’m abbreviating for the sake of this discussion). if the manuscript doesn’t acknowledge the literature or doesn’t suggest applicability to the library at large, what hook can the reviewer hang his decision to publish/not publish on?
is the field of library science just publishing these to get a full issue of a journal out or is there a legitimate reason to treat a case study like a research article that i’m missing?
i used this as my introduction slide to talk about a research project i did about marketing electronic resources recently. it was nice and quiet in the lecture hall until people got to the last entry…
a double-blind peer review process for manuscripts means that neither the author or reviewer are revealed to each other. most of the journals to which i’ve submitted manuscripts have this kind of review. there’s good support for this double-blind peer review, especially related to gender equality in publishing. the concept is positive and it’s something i’m in favor of. the practical problem for the effectiveness of this in librarianship, however, is that the anonymity aspect doesn’t work. the area i research and write about, electronic resources, has a small circle of experts. we all read each others publications. this becomes a problem at the point of a manuscript review because i can assume that a good editor will also know these experts and send my manuscripts to them for comment. in the last two reviews i’ve easily been able to determine the identity of the reviewers. in fact, i wasn’t even trying to figure out who the reviewers were, but based on their comments it was obvious. it was probably also obvious to the reviewers who i am as a writer.
how does this affect the final version of our manuscripts? what do you think?
about a month ago i mentioned that we were in the midst of preparing our journal lists to send to the academic departments on campus. thanks to comments from @gohomekiki , the lists we made this year are much improved. we swapped journal lists and got good feedback from each other on how to improve our respective excel files. i’ll paste a screen shot here of what the newest version of our list looks like (prices removed). for the screen shot i chose a title list from a teeny tiny fund so it would all fit on one screen. we’ve colored the cells where we ask for feedback with that turquoise color, to make it easier for the department liaison to follow. ooh, and do you see how nice our header is? we totally stole that from @gohomekiki. i’m all for improving the lists for next year, so if you’ve got feedback then please leave a comment. if you want feedback on the way you format your own lists, send me a sample via email.
