SHE Pod Season 2 Episode 5: Angus Dawson on Authorship and the Role of the Reviewer
1:03AM May 16, +0000
Speakers:
Kathryn MacKay
Angus Dawson
Keywords:
reviewers
authors
authorship
paper
people
bioethics
journal
journals
acknowledge
counts
area
angus
public health ethics
humanities
review
thinking
interesting
editor
medical
push
Hello, and welcome to the She Research Podcast. I'm your host, Kate MacKay. And today I'm joined by Angus Dawson, who's the editor of the Journal Public Health Ethics. And today, we're actually going to be discussing authorship and acknowledgement, and a few different issues with regard to publishing in academia. So hi, Angus.
Hi, Kate, how are you doing?
I'm good. How are you doing?
I'm fine. Thank you.
Great. Thanks so much for being here to discuss this with me, you have loads of experience in journals and publishing and that kind of thing. So I mentioned that you're the editor of Public Health Ethics. And I believe you, in fact, started the journal. So I guess I wondered, first, what are your... what are your experiences with journals, publication, being an editor?
Yes. So the journal was founded... came out 2008, which now seems like a long time ago. And I worked a lot with my friends and colleague, myself and they. And we co-founded the journal. And at the time, we were a little bit worried that we already knew everybody in the world who worked on the the area of public health ethics. And we're very pleased to say that we have... get a lot of work now from people that we've not met before and not not heard of, which is great. And that... what that suggests is that there is a growing field, a growing body of work there. There's a literature that genuinely is, I think, increasingly distinct from what we might call sort of mainstream bioethics.
Yeah, well, that's great. And have you been... I mean, what led to becoming the editor of a journal or kicking off the journal?
I guess we were very keen to try and sort of push people to think about what are the ethical issues, what's distinctive about the ethical issues that arise in the area of public health and provide a forum for thinking about developing the the arguments focusing on case studies. Tried to develop a little bit as an distinct area within bioethics more generally. So it's... we were lucky enough to kind of get in at a time where there was growing interest in this area. But there weren't other journals that provided the same kind of focus. So another area, for example, of bioethics which emerged around the same time, would be something like neuroethics, where I think there were two or three journals that that basically started around the same time. And maybe that's then meant that there's less of a kind of focus of building a particular vision for what the area of neuroethics is, maybe, maybe that's good or bad. So there's an interesting set of issues about if you just have one journal, and you have a particular kind of perspective upon that which is, is there behind the journal, you know, we take a pretty strong line trying to sort of police the boundaries, as it were, for what counts as a public health ethics issue. So you know, we do occasionally get papers on euthanasia and abortion, for example. And what we do is, in principle, we would accept a paper on one of those topics, but it would have to be a paper that was focused on more thinking about things from a public health, a population perspective. So for example, on abortion, you know, if you're looking at the impact of regulations or laws upon the harms at the population level, of not... of, you know, restrictive abortion practices, for example, then that's something that would fit the remit of the journal, where it's just about responding to some kind of tweak in a thought experiment, relating to abortion as a ethical or unethical, individual-based decision, then that is something that would not fit the remit of the journal.
Hmm. Yeah, that would be more of the bioethics, medical ethics sort of field. So in your... in your experiences as an editor and as a reviewer before that, I would assume... have you noticed particular trends in authorship through public health ethics and bioethics more broadly?
Yes, I think there are a couple of things that I'd sort of mentioned as key. So I did do a little analysis, which was then going to go into an editorial that we will write at some point for public health ethics that looks at one trend in relation to authorship, which is the... the increase in the average number of authors.
Oh interesting,.
So over the course of what's now we're into our 13th year I think, of the journal 'ublic Health Ethics'. We've seen an increase in the average number of authors over that time. And I think that reflects a number of things. I mean, here we're grasping for explanations for this. I think one is a increasing focus on what we might call empirical methods within bioethics generally, which tends to increase authorship. So if you think about bioethics as being an interdisciplinary field, where you have people who have different expertise, drawing from sociology, philosophy, etcetera, then that will tend to increase the number of authors. I think the the converse of that is thinking about the reduction in more philosophical perspectives in relation to, to bioethics, philosophy, or humanities, subjects in general, tend to have more of an idea about authorship being attached to the actual writing of the paper itself. And therefore, within that disciplinary tradition, there tends to be fewer authors, I think can another pressure is from - everybody that's an academic is under pressure to generate as many papers as possible. And that does then encourage an idea about projects, which are perhaps funded, and you have a team of people, again, perhaps with different disciplinary backgrounds. And there's a sort of implicit assumption that by being on a project, you then count as an author. And I think that then raises questions we've been trying to sort of push back a little bit on this with, with our general public health ethics, to sort of ask people why there are so many authors. So we've actually set the default now for our journal is that you can't have more than three author's unless you you justify that through special consideration. So that then runs into the other kind of influence here, I think, which is disciplinary norms about what counts as authorship. And I think this is a really key thing. And I think the more empirical work that's done in bioethics broadly, the more that there's a kind of expectation that you will be governed by what I would think of as being more medical disciplinary norms rather than humanities disciplinary norms. So the fact that you have gathered some empirical data that played no role in actually literally writing the paper, is a sufficient kind of justification for - on some people's grounds - for actually counting as an author. But in some other cases, being a senior person who has got the initial grant seems to also count as sufficient criteria for being counted as an author. So it's kind of thinking where I guess every journal has to try and make a decision here about what their view of authorship is, and then try and police that because essentially, this is increasingly contested. In an area like bioethics, which is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, I think it becomes really, really difficult, because different people who are sending in papers to a journal like ours, they themselves have different ideas of what counts as authorship. We, as I say, are trying to kind of push back a little bit on this and ask questions. And it's really interesting the responses that you get when, when you ask questions about authorship, because some people immediately sort of go from 10 authors to two authors, when, when they, when they're asked that question, and the very fact that they do that, I think, is very interesting. Other groups like push back themselves, and they say 'No, no, all of these people are authors they all played, they meet the criteria for the International Medical Editor's Journal statement as to what cancers as authorship', which is very, very open as to what counts as a contribution sufficient to count as as an author. We are trying to establish a narrower kind of idea about, there must be a contribution to the actual writing of the paper itself. And again, that's, that's trying to sort of have more of a humanities kind of perspective. And the other kind of paper that you occasionally get is what I would refer as... to as being more like statement papers. So you have a symposium in the days we could meet up together. You, you'd have some some meeting of people from all around the world in some glamorous place, usually in Switzerland. And then there would be a statement on a particular topic, which is usually written by just one or two people, but everybody at the meeting would be asked to read it, comment it, revise it, and so on, then there'll be a final version produced. And essentially, people that would count as authors on that would essentially be endorsing that particular statement. And again, I personally don't think of that as being sufficient grounds for authorship. But you would get a paper with maybe 25. authors, and in scare quotes, so. So, so yeah, I think that's some of the broad trends. I think that number of authors is going up. And I think it's time for us to think critically about what's actually going on there. And is that a trend that we just accept? Or do we actually want to push back?
And it's interesting, you mentioned the International Medical Editors Standards... Medical Journal Editors Standards. And I wonder if Is there such a thing for the humanities editors? Or no such thing?
No, we've we've not been able to find it. And actually, so our journal is published by Oxford University Press, we've had lots of discussion with them, like looking at other journals, and whether they have statements about authorship and so on. And and basically, all of the medical and science ones go with that statement. And humanities ones tend to just have nothing because that the notion of authorship is essentially disciplined by the norms within that particular discipline. So I think the idea is that there's there's no parallel kind of trends for the increase in authorship in history or religious studies or philosophy, I think.
Mm... hmm. Interesting. So now for a slightly different question. But still about acknowledging, acknowledging people's input to a paper. And this is a question that arises because of a kind of off the back of a recent paper that's come out in the journal 'Theoria' that is about whether and how we should acknowledge reviewers comments, that have significantly improved a paper. So I think, you know, in some of the things that you were just saying there about authorship and how authorship is kind of expanding, and like if you've just, for example, if it's the lab kind of model where the person who won the grant has their name, and immediately on every paper that comes out of that grant, they may have actually had no role in writing the paper. Whereas perhaps, a reviewer, who's given really good and careful comments, has in fact had even more of a role in helping to shape that paper or improve that paper than that grant winner did. And how do we, how do we either acknowledge or kind of incorporate that into the way that the that authorship kind of gets acknowledged? I mean, I guess it would be very unusual to say that the reviewer is somehow then an author. But when we're thinking about the contribution they've made to the paper, it does seem more significant than perhaps some people who would be listed as an author. So what do you... yeah, what's your view on whether or not reviewers should be acknowledged and how that role sort of plays out with authorship?
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting set of issues thinking about essentially the contribution that is made by different parties. So the review process itself, I think, is really important as a means of having an expert in the particular area, reflect upon and give you feedback and provide you with some some thoughts that you can choose to either take into account or not. And I think you're right, that the more that you go towards that medical and science kind of idea about what counts as authorship, the more problematic these kinds of considerations seem to be. So I I do think that acknowledgement, and gratitude should reflect the the amount of effort, effort that's that's made. And, you know, I think it's it's often the case that reviewers comments can be really, really positive and helpful. Of course, in some cases, they they can also be nasty, mean-spirited, unhelpful, I don't think there's anything wrong in kind of pushing back. And this is one of the things that occasionally, I'm asked to give talks to early-career people in relation to publishing in journals. And one of the things that I encourage people to do is to not over revise their papers in response to reviewers comments. You know at the end of the day, it's your paper, and you have to have confidence in it. And sometimes I've seen papers that are actually weaker as a result of the re-... the review process, because they've taken far too seriously the detail of the comments that have come from reviewers. So I think having confidence in your own views and sort of saying, this is a different perspective, other things here that I can take in and find useful and positive. But don't be afraid to kind of push back when there are things which take you off in a different direction, or, you know, they're those annoying reviewer comments that 'oh would be far better if you've written a paper about x when writing about y'.
(laughs) right.
But but I think going back to... sorry, that was a bit of a tangent. But going back to this central issue about the role of reviewers, I think, certainly within humanities, disciplines or humanities perspectives, the role of the reviewer is really, really important, and can be really influential in terms of revising work. And I think it's good to acknowledge that we have had a couple of times in our journal, reviewers actually requesting to be identified... so at the end of the review process. So our review processes is double-blinded, like like many traditional humanities journals, so you wouldn't normally know who a named individual was as a reviewer. But the request has come from a reviewer who felt that their review has actually influenced the revision of the paper. So when they've seen the second version, they've sort of said, 'Well, I would like to be identified to the authors, so that I can be thanked appropriately in the acknowledgments'. And I think that's a really interesting process. Of course, other journals have a completely open process. And I think that has potential advantages and disadvantages. I think that personally, I'm a big fan of anonymised reviewing, because it means that you, there's a danger that for example, you might be impressed by the name of a particular author who has some authority within the field, and maybe you are going to pull your punches when it comes to the review process, because you're impressed by who the author is, rather than reading the paper on its own merits. And one experience I had many years ago when I reviewed a paper was it was for a journal which had a system of anonymisation which... the paper was produced by a big name in the field, and I'm sure I would have been intimidated by that and been less critical in my review, if if I knew, at that stage who the author was. Of course, I found out later on when that paper was published. In that case, I recommended rejection and they decided to accept the paper anyway.
(Laughs). And that's interesting, too. But that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Yes.
But yeah, I think that's really interesting. And I've been in the... I've been in the reverse position, to the reviewers that you mentioned, where recently, I submitted a paper to a journal, and I got really detailed reviewer comments back that I think, significantly improved the paper. And I sort of said in my comments back to the editors, you know, I really wish that I could acknowledge these people properly, instead of just saying the generic 'thank you to two anonymous reviewers, etc'. Because, yeah, it's, it's funny, you know, if you then met these people later at a conference or at a talk or something like that, they might know that they've reviewed reviewed that paper for you, but you don't know that they've done you that service in, in return. So it's asymmetrical. And it just think, in that case, I sort of think, you know, if I did meet these people at a conference, perhaps I already even know them, I would want to be able to say thank you. And just say, 'I really appreciated that'. And, you know, whatever that means, because I think it is important to acknowledge that, that they've done that work for you.
Yes. So I think in that kind of situation, it's completely appropriate to ask whether they would be willing to be acknowledged at the end of the process. So I think, you know, we ought to be moving in a direction where we're able to do that. So as I said, I think there are advantages to an anonymised reviewer process. But I think to truly acknowledge where some individuals have made a significant contribution to perhaps reshaping or developing the author's ideas in a paper, we ought to be able to do more to actually acknowledge that.
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me about this, Angus. It's a really interesting and big topic. And if anyone is interested in reading about this further, the article that I mentioned that sort of kicked off this discussion and thinking about this is entitled, 'Should Acknowledgments in Public Academic Articles Include Gratitude for Reviewers Who Reviewed for Journals that Rejected Those Articles', so something we haven't really touched on in our conversation. And that paper is published in Theoria, authored by Joona Räsänen and Pekka Louhiala, and I'll link to it in this episode's show notes. So thanks so much for being with me today, Angus. And thanks so much to everyone for listening to this episode of the She Research Podcast. You can find the paper I've just mentioned linked in the notes along with a transcript of the episode. She Pod is hosted by me, Kathryn MacKay and produced by Madeline Goldberger. And you can find our other episodes on Spotify, Radio Public, Anchor or wherever else you get your podcasts of quality. Thanks again for listening. Bye.