Practical Advice for Journal Editors and Referees

Lyall, Catherine; Bruce, Ann; Tait, Joyce, Meagher. Laura, Interdisciplinary Research Journeys, Huntingdon, GBR: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2011, p. 161 [http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/Interdisciplinary-Research-Journeys/book-ba-9781849661782.xml ] provides some practical advice for journal editors and referees:

Those responsible for journals and related decision-making regarding interdisciplinary submissions should consider certain strategies:

· Conspicuously ‘opening up’ the journal to demonstrate the credibility of interdisciplinary work (e.g. through special issues, overview articles, encouraging ready access based on topics);

· Providing clear briefings for reviewers that alert them to issues arising in review of interdisciplinary manuscripts;

· Providing journal-specific guidance to reviewers as to expectations of their approach to reviewing interdisciplinary manuscripts, even, if appropriate, tailoring a review form to be used for such manuscripts;

· Selecting reviewers carefully, ensuring coverage of more than one of the component source disciplines and that at least one reviewer possesses interdisciplinary empathy;

· Raising awareness of issues involved in integrating divergent reviews received on interdisciplinary submissions and thus developing the confidence to take on a senior decision-making role, despite possible diversity in reviews.

Those acting as reviewers for interdisciplinary submissions may wish to consider

· The journal’s apparent stance on interdisciplinarity, any guidelines given

· How the manuscript could broaden coverage in/add new understanding to/provoke subsequent work in the field of the journal or its readers;

· What added value the manuscript derives from its interdisciplinarity;

· Whether possible naivety about some aspect of a component discipline is actually destructive, or not, to the value of the paper;

· The reviewer’s own biases, so that the reviewing process is more ‘self-aware’ than usual within one discipline when many criteria are tacitly understood.

An awareness of the biases that can afflict even interdisciplinary research (and its evaluation) suggests some further questions [These questions are developed in Szostak, Rick, Classifying Science, Springer, 2004, p.192]:

· What incentives did researchers face (scholarly or practical) to find certain results?

· What institutional constraints did researchers operate under and how did these affect results?

· How did this research fit within the broader history of ideas (did the preceding scholarly conversation bias the investigation)?

· Was a broader perspective feasible and how might it have affected results.

· What rhetorical devices were used to convince the audience?

Such questions shed light on the all-important question of whether research results are accepted by a scholarly community because they are based on strong argument and evidence, or for other reasons.