In response to the article dated 23 August, 2010, wherein Patricia Cohen, New York Times, explains how Dan Cohen, George Mason University, considers current academic culture–literature, in particular–the “exclusive” domain of “the charmed circle of tenured academe” (Cohen, 2010). They crticize the dearth of individuals that have invested

significant time and effort to develop disciplined higher order reasoning as a “monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals.” The de-emphasis of prestige that I believe social media and revolutionary applications of it to research, such as Mendeley, has the power to encourage and the consequent emphasis on scholarliness and quality of research can improve integrity in science by raising expectations on all researchers to be familiar with research regardless of the Impact Factor of the journal it was published in.

Doing so would allow quality research to be published in a timely manner, quality assured by peer review, but eliminating “the dog ate my paper” as an excuse as well as the “dog published my paper” excuses that come free in the box with allowing submissions and revisions from everyone and their dogs. Just like so many other blogs, I launched mine (http://robincheung.info/mbalog/) without any more inspiration than the myriad other blogs launched by keen young MBA grads after reading that “the best thing you can do is start a blog (or video series or wiki or some other online channel)” (Scott, 2010). After deciding I had mastered half the art of optimizing blog readership, I though I should try the arguably-harder opposite goal of maximizing.

Now that I’ve spent time in the natural and social sciences, as a bank analyst and an academic, and don’t feel smarter or richer than anyone else in particular, I think my role is to spend the time and effort to explain some of the more advanced concepts that researchers and academics often base on actual stock prices, that practitioners and professionals don’t want to invest a little brain make think into for more consistent and defensible outcomes, and that everyone else thinks is either black magic or secret methods to exploit them. In a similar way, I feel that the NY Times article was written to persuade rather than to inform–to sell newspapers rather than solve a problem. It looks like a story a researcher’s topic, written by a journalist (in contrast to a researcher writing a phenomenology on sensationalism in journalism).

Even though I’ve barely crossed the starting line in my academic career, it is immediately clear that the NY Times article argues that the solution to the research-equivalent the square peg-round hole problem is to improve peg-squaring efficiency to reduce any delays during the stochastic peg-rounding process. Necessary specificity of research questions and their logical emergence from previous findings they tend to exhibit most often questions how effective the blinded review process is in ensuring reviewers treat both friends and competing researchers’ works the same.

In order to capitalize on popular perception of academics in their exclusive Ivory Towers and undermine the dogma that blinded peer review is needed to prevent application of theory to inappropriate situations (intentionally or unintentionally), using deprecated methodologies or analyses to support a researcher’s beliefs, data, or birthday wishes (see Flescihman, 1989) Patricia Cohen (2010) now “experts evaluate a submission, often under a veil of anonymity, can take months, even years” The reality is that academia does not at all need a greater abundance of scholarly publications but rather a systemic shift towards an equilibrium that rewards increased accountability, pursuit of truth over personal glory or this-worldly rewards (but not Weber’s all-holy this-worldly ascetism).

The union of a researcher’s familiarity with key researchers in their own field combined with caring enough to know what project their friends currently find more important than catching up over lunch–or even a phone call–notwithstanding, Cohen (2010) retains “anonymity” as a straw man argument intended only to support the generalization that this anonymity reduces accountability; by convention, I define the intersection of researchers whose papers make it to blinded review that believe anonymity is their paper’s saving grace( from a rival’s biased review) and the set of researchers that cannot reject the existence of Santa Claus at a non-neurotic significance level to be the null set.  Practical considerations and costs dictate each journals’ policies, but I know that the critical feedback for the few papers I have had the opportunity to review anonymously was forwarded to the authors to inform improvements to their paper.  My own comments were even rated for usefulness by the original authors in some cases.

Adoption of social media platform such as Mendeley will drive. It is true that some prestigious journals have rejection rates over 95% and equally true that some of these journals average 12 to 18 months–or longer–from the time a paper is accepted until it reaches the news stands (or doesn’t reach the news stands, in the case of any respectable journal). It is just as true that humans live to 120 years of age before dying of old age. What it is not is either “representative” or “ideal” Article turnaround times averaged three months for arbitrarily-selected journals published by Springer, a leading journal megapublisher that brings you such exciting leading edge scholarly publications such as “Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics” and “International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing,” (although I did win an Amazon Kindle 2 eBook reader from filling out a comment card at their display booth a few weeks ago at the Academy of Management 2010 Annual Meeting in Montréal, my selection of Springer as an archetypal publisher was by no means influenced because they awarded me the awesome new ebook reader that is actually suitable for academic research and not just for reading novels; maybe someone will leverage the Mendeley public API and extend ebook readers beyond simply a way to carry around more articles).

Without even looking for a brand new ISSN number, there are already myriad scholarly journals struggling that have competent editors, astute methodologists that will call you if you try to use a pairwise t-test when there is no good reason not to use an ANOVA Levene’s test, or that you did know using ANOVA would avoid amplifying Type I error from pairwise t-tests, but you forgot if the null hypothesis in Levene’s test was that population variances were homo- or heterogeneous and flipped a coin for your post hoc. There are many competent reviewers who will critically review your study’s insightful correlation of psychopathology to the Big Five personality traits, diligently-assessed through a rigorous administration of MBTI MMPI, and NEO-PI (clearly supported by a citation in the Harvand Journal of Psychology, one of the myriad+1 peer-reviewed journals that now exist; somehow the hypothetical Institutional Review Board didn’t find that undue burden on test subjects I guess), in accordance with the Protection of Human Research Participants principles attested by the free NIH certification, to matched samples (of size calculated using the appropriate sample size calculation for the anticipated tests using G*Power 3) of 18- and 19-year-old Form 5 exchange students from Hong Kong, all of whom gave informed consent. Just the same, methodologists might enquiry how you’ve considered “regression to the mean” in your design–psychopathology itself being defined by abnormal behaviours and that you anticipate would be reflected in abnormal scores. And psychologists who took more than introductory elective I took in undergrad might point out that different cultures may systemically personality traits differently to the population used to norm reference the tests.

As early as 1996, libraries hoped electronic journals (in development since 1976) would be able to mitigate the huge acquisition and maintenance costs of traditional paper-bound scholarly journals (Harter, 1996). First Mondayirb is a “peer reviewed” journal that has been openly accessible on the Internet since 1996 that states its articles are reviewed by “at least three reviewers for originality and timeliness in the context of related research” (First Monday Editorial Policies, 2010), but whether reviewers critique validity, methodology, or theoretical framework was not as clear. One recent ethnographic examination of scientists that use blogs in a scholarly context, acknolwedged that blogs may not be appropriate in all situations, but since “the aim of this article is to study the motivations of researchers that keep a blog, and because of this point of departure, the critical or problematic aspects of blogging were not main topics” (Kjellberg, 2010). Although I may be a fledgling researcher myself and appreciate the higher order reasoning practice required to deduce specific examples of “problematic aspects,” I would prefer if the author could delineate some prototypical cases to ensure I internalize a model of blogging congruent with the author’s. I have encountered one of these “problematic aspects” in my own blog; in response to a recent blog post pointing out that activists are no less guilty of manipulating the truth than the corporations they decry, I was asked by the author to pretend there was never any attempt to manipulate readers because they had erased whole portions of their post to which I objected. The author clearly intended to leverage complex-sounding scientific terms to incite fear in the public of such as compounds as “calcium carbonate (chalk)” (Cheung, 2010).

I’m not sure whether the original intent to use readers’ ignorance of scientific terminology for everyday compounds or the attempt to cover up the attempt was the greater disservice. Nevertheless, even if the focus of the article were to explore how certain scientists used blogs in a scholarly context, I would prefer the author at least delineate what advantages and disadvantages blogs had that made them worth investigating, if not evaluating each blog against a set of strengths and weaknesses.

One of the strengths I’ve come to appreciate of Walden’s doctoral programme is the redesigned research theory

and design courses that gives a structured “big picture” introduction to research design. Beginning with epistemology and ontology, students are encouraged to make sure they are asking research questions that are not only socially-relevant and that are appropriately-, but not arbitrarily-,specific; whether paid by accountability-demanding tax-payers or investors that nod when you ask if they’re sure they know what a Venn Diagram is and then equally frenetically point to the area outside the only circle (these must be the same kids that keep telling us to “think outside the box”) in Figure 1 that Markowitz (1952) explains contains the set of “attainable E, V combinations,” you’ll inevitably have to say why out of you, Johnny, and Sarah, the only sensible strategy at the arcade is to give you the whole roll; it would be an epic waste of quarters any other way–without all of them, none of you has a chance at HI SCORE–durr.

As clear as it should be to any disciplined scientist–natural or social–that the invention of a teleportation machine would be unscientific, but the commercial application of it would be reckless, the distinction between a foray into a literature gap that yielded a commercially-successful innovation and a wholly-reckless unscientific guess that happened to function and may or may not eventually tear the universe a new black hole is frustratingly academic to investors, executives, and the teleportation market segment alike; furthermore, it would reinforce the common notion that academia does not pertain to real life. To the teleporting public, the warning against commercialization of a poorly-elucidated phenomenon makes less sense than why they should have to remember to apply Bessel’s correction (N-1) as the denominator for Sample Standard Deviation when simply dividing by N works (and makes more sense!) for Population Standard Deviation. And isn’t the sample supposed to be “representative” of the population, anyway??

References:

Cheung, R. (2010). The doGkins delusion: Deceived disciples. Retrieved 29 August, 2010 from http://robincheung.info/mbalog/2010/08/02/the-dogkins-delusion/

Cohen, P. (2010, August 24). Scholars test web alternative to peer review.  The New York Times. p. A1 Retrieved 29 August, 2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html

Fleischmann, M.  (1989). Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium.  Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 261 (2A): 301–308, doi:10.1016/0022-0728(89)80006-3

First Monday. (2010). Editorial policies: Peer review process. Retrieved 29 August, 2010 from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess

Harter, S.P. (1996). Electronic journals and scholarly communication: a citation and reference study. Information Research. 2(1). Retrieved 29 August, 2010 from http://informationr.net/ir/2-1/paper9a.html

Kjellberg, S. (2010). I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context. First Monday. 15(8) Retrieved 29 August, 2010 from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2962/2580

Markowitz, H. (1952). Portfolio selection. Journal of Finance, 7(1), 77-91. Retrieved from Business Source Alumni Edition database. Scott, D. (2010). Job search advice for university students and recent graduates. Retrieved 29 August, 2010 from http://www.webinknow.com/2010/06/job-search-advice-for-university-students-and-recent-graduates.html