The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior at fifty

The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was founded in 1958 by a group of male psychologists, mainly from the northeastern USA and connected with either Harvard or Columbia. Fifty years later about 20% of both editors and authors reside outside this country and almost the same proportion is made up of women. Other changes in the journal include having its own website for more than a decade and now publishing online as well as on paper. A recent connection with PubMed Central of the National Library of Medicine has made possible the completely free electronic presentation of the entire archive of about 3,800 articles.     

Peer review for journals: Evidence on quality control, fairness, and innovation

This paper reviews the published empirical evidence concerning journal peer review consisting of 68 papers, all but three published since 1975. Peer review improves quality, but its use to screen papers has met with limited success. Current procedures to assure quality and fairness seem to discourage scientific advancement, especially important innovations, because findings that conflict with current beliefs are often judged to have defects. Editors can use procedures to encourage the publication of papers with innovative findings such as invited papers, early-acceptance procedures, author nominations of reviewers, structured rating sheets, open peer review, results-blind review, and, in particular, electronic publication. Some journals are currently using these procedures. The basic principle behind the proposals is to change the decision from whether to publish a paper to how to publish it. The author, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School since 1968, was a founder editor of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting. This paper is based on a presentation at a workshop, “Advances in Peer Review Research”, American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting, Baltimore, MD, February 9, 1996.     

The Academic Productivist Regime: Affective Dynamics in the Moral-Political Economy of Publishing

With proliferating neoliberal modes of science governance, publishing has become more important. Recent studies point to researchers’ feeling of exhaustion and anxiety as responses to academic performance regimes. Yet how affects underpin publishing in scientific cultures and communities, and what this implies for STS scholarship has remained underexplored. Drawing on insights from ethnographic fieldwork and the cultural studies of affect, this article traces the role of emotions, including hope, contempt, and excitement for understanding the new academic productivist regime at a Czech research institution. While junior researchers’ orientations are fostered through rendering publications objects of hope, a moral-political economy intersects with geopolitical history and values of research organization to shape the publication practices of many senior scientists. An affective labor of combat and equanimity is necessary for managing these orientations that are corporeally energized by a dynamic of thrill. This four-pronged approach makes palpable how emotions render scientists’ bodies hopeful, combative and excited while intersecting with ideals of meritocratic research organization and assessment. Frustration and failure are never entirely absent but serve as an immanent driving force for a publishing culture that thrives on adrenaline, combativeness, and hope. This makes it difficult to leverage failures towards criticism of the academic productivist regime—both for the scientists differently affected within the institution and STS researchers. Different engagements with this regime require a more capacious accounting for the pleasure and thrill generated by the uncertainty of publication outcome as well as by unacknowledged practices of care.     

Why So Low?

Empirical evidence indicates that women philosophers tend to submit their work to journals substantially less often than their male colleagues. This paper points out that this difference in submission behavior comes with other specific aspects of women philosophers’ behavior, such as a tendency to be reluctant to participate in discussions, to be willing to do work low in prestige, and to specialize in certain research topics, and it argues that these differences can be understood as indirect effects of social biases: namely, effects on the working behavior of members of targeted social groups. Recent findings from philosophy journals’ book review sections and from other academic disciplines known to suffer from gender problems, especially from STEM disciplines, lend additional weight to this hypothesis.     

Contemporary Psychotherapy: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

This editorial summarizes the founding of the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, and its evolution into its current form. Also, the editor provides several recommendations for authors hoping to publish their ideas regarding psychotherapy. Finally, the current editor acknowledges the numerous people who have worked to develop, improve, and strengthen the journal.     

Author gender differences in psychology citation impact 1996–2018

Academic psychology in the USA is a gender success story in terms of overturning its early male dominance but there are still relatively few senior female psychology researchers. To assess whether there are gender differences in citation impact that might help to explain either of these trends, this study investigates psychology articles since 1996. Seven out of eight Scopus psychology categories had a majority of female first-authored journal articles by 2018. From regression analyses of first and last author gender and team size, female first authors associate with a slightly higher average citation impact, but extra authors have a 10 times stronger association with higher average citation impact. Last author gender has little association with citation impact. Female first authors are more likely to be in larger teams and if team size is attributed to the first author's work, then their apparent influence of female first authors on citation impact doubles. While gender differences in average citation impact are too small to account for gender-related trends in academic psychology, they warn that male-dominated citation-based ranking lists of psychologists do not reflect the state of psychology research today.     

论“以善为本”的出版理念

出版理念是指出版主体关于出版价值的根本性的判断 ,“以善为本”就是以促进社会公益和精神文明的发展为核心 ,它不仅为出版活动提供道德理想 ,而且为出版活动提供良好秩序。     

The Problem of Peer Review is the Most Important Philosophical Problem

As philosophers we should have as one of our aims to produce as much philosophical knowledge as possible. A lot of potential philosophical knowledge is lost because of the flaws of the peer review system, and so a lot of philosophical knowledge would be gained were the system improved. Accordingly, as authors we should write papers about how to fix peer review, and as editors we should accept such papers if they are good. This paper presents some familiar problems with peer review, elaborates on and motivates the argument just given, and replies to some objections to it, making the case that fixing peer review is both a philosophical problem and one that admits of a solution.     

Why Not Open the Black Box of Journal Editing in Philosophy? Make Peer Reviews of Published Papers Available

Despite general agreement within philosophy that peer review is indispensable, its fairness and reliability is often questioned. This article suggests that such worries can to a large extent be met by adopting the practice that reviews as well as earlier versions of papers are made publicly available when the final version of a paper is published. This suggestion combines the advantages of transparency with the merits of anonymity of reviewers. While there are obstacles to this suggestion, the article argues that it would be worthwhile to implement it because it can help map patterns of conduct and secure confidence in the fairness and reliability of review procedures and journal editing within philosophy.