Letters – 4 October 2018

Academia’s ‘clans’ behind referees’ bias

Having been an international academic journal editor for 33 years, I read with interest “Male editors ‘more likely to accept papers from other men’ ” (News, 28 September). When I deal with manuscripts, I strive to be objective, balanced and fair. But my aim is to build a better journal, so I am strict about what I accept for publication. If there are patterns in quality, the contents of the journal will reflect them.

That may seem very simple, but there are two other issues. First, there is a thread of serious bias among referees, which I first noticed in 1985 when I started my editorial role. Willingness to review papers is related to gender, national origin and whether or not European or North American men are among the authors. I termed it “academic racism”: that may be an overstatement, but such bias is certainly part of the “clannishness” of academic life. It is by no means universal, but it is a highly consistent phenomenon.

I find that papers from authors in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and India require more effort to get reviewed. This may be because of a record of poor scholarship in these countries, but it is hard on authors from such places. Fairness means that even second-rate papers need to be reviewed and their shortcomings (gently) pointed out so that the authors can improve their work, which will benefit us all.

The second issue is the pressure that universities put on staff to compete, especially in research outcomes. The result is a failure to help academics elsewhere. Westerners, by and large, are reluctant to give help to African authors. Some good work is coming out of African universities, and it is a struggle to give it the recognition it deserves. It is also a struggle to ensure that Africans feel included in the international research endeavour. It should not be.

The best research should involve collaboration, and exclusionary policies and actions should be reduced. Fostering a community of scholarship means taking positive action to include those who would join it and fairly recognising good work, whoever its author. I fear that that requires a different model of university.

DavidEricAlexander
Via timeshighereducation.com

Milling hypocrisy

For her feature on contract cheating (“‘There’s clearly a demand; there’s clearly a supply’”, 13 September), Anna McKie is to be congratulated for not following the trail worn by most of those distressed by the proliferation of essay mills. It is disingenuous to lay all blame on lazy students who desire a job rather than an education.

McKie considers just how great are the disincentives that academics face in reporting suspect essays. These disincentives are not unintended consequences: they have been deliberately put in place by universities that value reputation above education.

Those who run essay mills are often outraged by criticism of their industry. This is not because theirs is a particularly worthy endeavour, but rather because blaming essay mills hides the hypocrisy of their critics.

We recently learned about academics who publish thousands of papers (“Hyperprolific academics ‘don’t meet author criteria’ – study”, News, 20 September). Universities do not discourage such academics even though they cannot possibly have written all the papers they publish. Others have written for them and have been paid, directly or indirectly, for their efforts. What is the difference between this behaviour and that of a student buying an essay? Ah, comes the tired, self-righteous response that McKie avoids: students are being marked. And academics are not?

Stuart Macdonald
Visiting professor, School of Management, University of Leicester

Moo-mery aids

In his review of The Third Lens: Metaphor and the Creation of Modern Cell Biology, by Andrew S. Reynolds (Books, 6 September), Jon Turney argues that the book “should be an encouragement to explore other fields in the same way”. Such a subject could be the psychology of memory. In a 1980 paper, Henry L. Roediger III gathered together 36 metaphors for memory, which included a “wax tablet”, a “cow’s stomach” and a “mystic writing pad”. Unfortunately, he omitted my favourite, which is the “lardarium”, or great storehouse, proposed by St Augustine of Hippo.

R. E. Rawles
Honorary research fellow in psychology
UCL

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