This article was downloaded by: [Flinders University of South Australia] On: 04 October 2014, At: 00:50 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/urqe20
Together, We Move Science Forward a
Weimo Zhu a
Editor-in-Chief Published online: 20 May 2014.
To cite this article: Weimo Zhu (2014) Together, We Move Science Forward, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 85:2, 125-126, DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2014.904165 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2014.904165
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 85, 125–126, 2014 Copyright q SHAPE America ISSN 0270-1367 print/ISSN 2168-3824 online DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2014.904165
EDITORIAL: Note From the Editor-in-Chief
Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 00:50 04 October 2014
Together, We Move Science Forward
When talking about advancing science, we often use the quote “standing on the shoulder of giants” to praise the contributions of pioneers in a field. I would like to direct your attention to the article “Advancing Kinesiology Through Improved Peer Review” by Knudson, Morrow, and Thomas in this issue. This article recognizes the contributions and critical roles of our peers, including you, in advancing science. Based on a careful review of the current peer-review practices in kinesiology, Knudson et al. provide six excellent recommendations on how to further improve our peer-review practice, which should in turn help in advancing research and science in kinesiology. Based on their recommendations, I am working actively with the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (RQES) Editorial Board and publisher to further improve our review process. I also had several thoughts while reading their article and would like to share them with you: 1. Please value our peers. While I know, as we all know, the importance of teamwork, the value of peers in scientific inquiry became more evident when I started to take over the editorial operation of RQES. As I mentioned in my editorial last year (Zhu, 2013), without the dedicated service of 24 associate editors and 350 reviewers last year alone, there would have been no RQES. They are the backbone of RQES! More importantly, our peers’ comments, insights, and sometime “harsh” criticisms improve research quality significantly. This reminds me of an ancient Confucian saying: “If three of us are walking together, there will certainly be a teacher for me.” This quote emphasizes that we can always learn from our peers. 2. Please support our peers. To ensure that the peerreview process moves forward smoothly, we need all members in our professional community to share responsibilities and provide services and support. When invited to review, we should all agree, if possible. Whenever there is a chance to share your
knowledge and support your colleagues through peer review or like services, we should all be “good to go”! If we are all too busy to serve and downplay our colleagues’ contributions, who is going to review our own research manuscripts? RQES has developed a sound reviewer recognition system by providing a review certificate upon request, and the journal acknowledges reviewers’ contributions in each year’s December issue. I welcome any further suggestions to improve the system. I would also like to take this opportunity to call on institutes/departments to recognize, value, and support peer-review services and other such contributions of faculty. Many institutes/departments these days do not acknowledge peer-review services and provide “zero” support for their faculty involved in significant professional service—no course-load reduction, no support for research assistantship, no extra office space. If this kind of culture continues, fewer people will be willing to serve, which, again, could likely hurt the science of a field in the long run. 3. Please read and follow the instructions carefully. In their recommendation to “publish clear evaluation standards,” Knudson et al. (2014/this issue) suggest that authors follow the submission guidelines/checklist, especially for electronic submissions. Although RQES has both guidelines and a checklist, we have found surprisingly that many authors fail to read or follow the guidelines or checklist carefully and submit manuscripts with many easy-to-avoid errors. In fact, about 90% of submissions do not pass the editorial office’s first checklist and about 75% of them would have been fine if they simply had followed the author guidelines—such as to submit in American Psychological Association format (2010), include required items in the cover letter, supply key words that are not also in the title for indexing purposes, etc. The high error rate reminds me of the “overconfidence/ calibration” phenomenon described by Hallinan
Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 00:50 04 October 2014
126
W. ZHU
(2009; i.e., “most of us tend to be poorly calibrated— we are not as good as we think we are”), and I truly appreciate the writing submission rules I learned in my doctoral training to “take a break of a few days, read the manuscript again; repeat this a few times before submitting a manuscript; ask a colleague to read the manuscript for you before submission.” Finally, you all are welcome to drop a note to the RQES editorial office ([email protected]) if you have any question regarding submission requirements. 4. Please train and involve our students. Knudson et al. (2014/this issue) also recommend to “help reviewers improve,” and I could not agree with them more. To increase the reviewer pool and improve review quality, we should strive to get more reviewers involved and trained. This is especially true for graduate students. So far, peer review has not been a formal part of graduate training in kinesiology, although some professors might purposely and actively have their students involved in the peerreview process in an informal way. I therefore call for the field of kinesiology to develop more formal peerreview training for kinesiology graduate students. In
fact, I am working with the publisher to explore whether we could develop a real-life peer-review training at RQES (e.g., let volunteer graduate students participate in the review process, but their reviews would not be used in decision making). In summary, without peer review, the quality of science will vanish. Let us value, support, and respect our peers more and start to create more formal peer-review training for our future scholars. Only in this way will we, together, be able to move science forward. REFERENCES American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. Hallinan, J. T. (2009). Why we make mistakes: How we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average. New York, NY: Broadway. Knudson, D. V., Morrow, J. R., & Thomas, J. R. (2014/this issue). Advancing kinesiology through improved peer review. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 85, 127–135. Zhu, W. (2013). 85 years later, RQES remains young, energized, innovative, and strong! Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 84, 405–406.
Weimo Zhu Editor-in-Chief
Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/urqe20
Together, We Move Science Forward a
Weimo Zhu a
Editor-in-Chief Published online: 20 May 2014.
To cite this article: Weimo Zhu (2014) Together, We Move Science Forward, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 85:2, 125-126, DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2014.904165 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2014.904165
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 85, 125–126, 2014 Copyright q SHAPE America ISSN 0270-1367 print/ISSN 2168-3824 online DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2014.904165
EDITORIAL: Note From the Editor-in-Chief
Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 00:50 04 October 2014
Together, We Move Science Forward
When talking about advancing science, we often use the quote “standing on the shoulder of giants” to praise the contributions of pioneers in a field. I would like to direct your attention to the article “Advancing Kinesiology Through Improved Peer Review” by Knudson, Morrow, and Thomas in this issue. This article recognizes the contributions and critical roles of our peers, including you, in advancing science. Based on a careful review of the current peer-review practices in kinesiology, Knudson et al. provide six excellent recommendations on how to further improve our peer-review practice, which should in turn help in advancing research and science in kinesiology. Based on their recommendations, I am working actively with the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (RQES) Editorial Board and publisher to further improve our review process. I also had several thoughts while reading their article and would like to share them with you: 1. Please value our peers. While I know, as we all know, the importance of teamwork, the value of peers in scientific inquiry became more evident when I started to take over the editorial operation of RQES. As I mentioned in my editorial last year (Zhu, 2013), without the dedicated service of 24 associate editors and 350 reviewers last year alone, there would have been no RQES. They are the backbone of RQES! More importantly, our peers’ comments, insights, and sometime “harsh” criticisms improve research quality significantly. This reminds me of an ancient Confucian saying: “If three of us are walking together, there will certainly be a teacher for me.” This quote emphasizes that we can always learn from our peers. 2. Please support our peers. To ensure that the peerreview process moves forward smoothly, we need all members in our professional community to share responsibilities and provide services and support. When invited to review, we should all agree, if possible. Whenever there is a chance to share your
knowledge and support your colleagues through peer review or like services, we should all be “good to go”! If we are all too busy to serve and downplay our colleagues’ contributions, who is going to review our own research manuscripts? RQES has developed a sound reviewer recognition system by providing a review certificate upon request, and the journal acknowledges reviewers’ contributions in each year’s December issue. I welcome any further suggestions to improve the system. I would also like to take this opportunity to call on institutes/departments to recognize, value, and support peer-review services and other such contributions of faculty. Many institutes/departments these days do not acknowledge peer-review services and provide “zero” support for their faculty involved in significant professional service—no course-load reduction, no support for research assistantship, no extra office space. If this kind of culture continues, fewer people will be willing to serve, which, again, could likely hurt the science of a field in the long run. 3. Please read and follow the instructions carefully. In their recommendation to “publish clear evaluation standards,” Knudson et al. (2014/this issue) suggest that authors follow the submission guidelines/checklist, especially for electronic submissions. Although RQES has both guidelines and a checklist, we have found surprisingly that many authors fail to read or follow the guidelines or checklist carefully and submit manuscripts with many easy-to-avoid errors. In fact, about 90% of submissions do not pass the editorial office’s first checklist and about 75% of them would have been fine if they simply had followed the author guidelines—such as to submit in American Psychological Association format (2010), include required items in the cover letter, supply key words that are not also in the title for indexing purposes, etc. The high error rate reminds me of the “overconfidence/ calibration” phenomenon described by Hallinan
Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 00:50 04 October 2014
126
W. ZHU
(2009; i.e., “most of us tend to be poorly calibrated— we are not as good as we think we are”), and I truly appreciate the writing submission rules I learned in my doctoral training to “take a break of a few days, read the manuscript again; repeat this a few times before submitting a manuscript; ask a colleague to read the manuscript for you before submission.” Finally, you all are welcome to drop a note to the RQES editorial office ([email protected]) if you have any question regarding submission requirements. 4. Please train and involve our students. Knudson et al. (2014/this issue) also recommend to “help reviewers improve,” and I could not agree with them more. To increase the reviewer pool and improve review quality, we should strive to get more reviewers involved and trained. This is especially true for graduate students. So far, peer review has not been a formal part of graduate training in kinesiology, although some professors might purposely and actively have their students involved in the peerreview process in an informal way. I therefore call for the field of kinesiology to develop more formal peerreview training for kinesiology graduate students. In
fact, I am working with the publisher to explore whether we could develop a real-life peer-review training at RQES (e.g., let volunteer graduate students participate in the review process, but their reviews would not be used in decision making). In summary, without peer review, the quality of science will vanish. Let us value, support, and respect our peers more and start to create more formal peer-review training for our future scholars. Only in this way will we, together, be able to move science forward. REFERENCES American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. Hallinan, J. T. (2009). Why we make mistakes: How we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average. New York, NY: Broadway. Knudson, D. V., Morrow, J. R., & Thomas, J. R. (2014/this issue). Advancing kinesiology through improved peer review. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 85, 127–135. Zhu, W. (2013). 85 years later, RQES remains young, energized, innovative, and strong! Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 84, 405–406.
Weimo Zhu Editor-in-Chief
