Professional Development Blog

Excel tip #1: Counting # of words

3/27/2015

Once again, the Internet saved me a couple of hours of my life (of course, it owes me more than a couple -- can we say E M A I L? Thanks a lot, internet!). Oh right, but I was being grateful here.

We have some open-ended data -- participants were asked an open-ended question, and could write as much or as little text as they would like to in response. A reviewer wanted to know how many words were in each participant's response. We have the data in Excel, and my initial, non-elegant idea was to pull it into a table in Word, and then, cell by cell, have Word do a word count.

But, google to the rescue:

The first hit was spot on. I recommend you go to the actual blog post, here, for the formula. He has good explanations of why it works, so you can cross check it with your needs and make sure it works for you. Here is the formula I used:

=IF(ISBLANK(CD2),0,LEN(TRIM(CD2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(CD2," ",""))+1)

I spot checked and everything seems to work out. Thank you Dave Bruns.

"The post Excel tip #1: Counting # of words" first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz's blog on March 27, 2015."

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Choosing a journal for submission

3/25/2015

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This week (well, the week of 2/19; I’m rather behind) in Professional Development we talked about, among other things, how to pick the journal you’d submit to. Beyond the super obvious, we talked about the following points:

When to decide. When possible, it’s helpful to decide before you start writing the paper. I would write a paper for Journal of Research on Adolescence with a much more theoretical/conceptual focus, whereas one for Journal of Adolescent Health with more of a public health impact focus. In addition, JAH has a much shorter manuscript length. I’ll have less backend work if I know where I plan to submit from the start. It’s not always possible, of course. It’s hard to know at the start of writing a thesis, for instance, where you might send it. But when you can pre-plan, it will make your life easier.

Building your CV. When possible, think what journal would make the best line on your CV for the jobs you will eventually apply. Honestly, I freaked out the students a bit with this point (they are 2nd year grad students) and had to backpedal some. My point was not that every journal has to be the perfect fit for your future job – many 2nd year students have no idea what their ideal future job will be. But when you do know, try to match it. As a couple of examples – if you know that you might want to work at a liberal arts college, they are less likely to have HDFS departments, and so students from our program are more likely headed to psychology departments at such universities. Thus, publishing in psychology journals when possible may be more valuable than sociology journals. When I was in grad school and pre-tenure, I didn’t want to send all of my papers to sex journals because I wanted to show that I was publishing in developmental journals that most of my colleagues were familiar with, in addition to some sex journals. Be strategic when possible. But don’t make yourself crazy.

Journal’s mission. Read the journal’s mission and instructions to authors. Some journals may seem like a great fit at first glance, but may only accept qualitative research. Some may only want data collected in the past 5 years. Having a good sense of the journal’s goals will quickly help you decide if it’s a good fit.

Tier. Not every paper you submit will go to a top tier journal. If you are in a rush to get something accepted (e.g., you will soon go up for review or are about to go on the market), it may make sense to aim a bit lower and have a lower chance of an outright rejection. Keep in mind, though, that lower tier journals sometimes provide more random reviews. I was associate editor at Developmental Psychology and at times I had to ask 10 people in order to get 3 reviewers. And that’s a top tier journal. Imagine what it’s like to get people to review for journals with less prestige.

Response time. Some journals are known for quick response times, and some for slow ones. Although some journals publish their response times, much of this information is reputation based. If you’re in a rush, obviously a journal with a quick response time is preferable. There are times when it may matter less. I have a paper that’s been with a journal for over 4 months now (5 months as I’m finally reviewing and posting this), and honestly, I’m just as happy that it hasn’t come back to me yet.

Page requirements. There’s a range of guidelines/requirements, so pick a journal that matches your planned length or existing length. Also, if you want to write a brief report, only some journals accept them.

Society-affiliated journals. It can be great to publish in a journal like Child Development or JRA that is connected to an organization/society. SRA sends out emails about every 2 weeks that summarize some key studies, and there’s also a prestige factor with being in the journal associated with the society that most people in your discipline belong to. So, keep an eye out for these journals.

Special Issues. Another high profile opportunity can be a special issue on a specific topic. You already know the journal is interested in that topic. And, when the issue comes out, you’ll be grouped with similarly themed papers, so people are more likely to find yours if they find one of them.

Browse recent issues. Before deciding, look at recent issues of that journal. Do they have similar samples? Similar methods? Topics? You don’t want to repeat what’s been done before, but if a journal never publishes papers about sex, or never uses college student samples, it may not be a good fit.

We also talked about some key points in writing a manuscript, which I’ll try to post about soon. And, we talked about intentional writing – you can see my series on it here:

Intentional writing introduction

Intentional writing #1: Use consistent terms

Intentional writing #2: Consistent ordering avoids confusion

Intentional writing #3: Vanquish the vague

Intentional writing #4: Dis the this

Intentional writing #5: Start & end strong

Intentional writing #6: Leave them with something to remember

“The post Choosing a journal for submission first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 25, 2015.”

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This week in Adolescent Development: Family context 2

3/23/2015

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We spent a fair bit of time talking about the role of culture and family obligation in adolescent development. Two students brought in articles by Telzer, Fuligni, Lieberman, and others that examined how family obligation and or family assistance relate to neural markers of risk taking and reward.

We also brought in several papers about sibling influences on risk taking, including work by Whiteman (a grad of our program) and colleagues examining sibling influences on substance use, deviant behaviors, and sexual risk taking.

We also talked a fair bit about divorce, including developmental differences in effects of divorce, and factors that might moderate divorce’s effects.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Family Context 2 first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 23, 2015.”

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This week in Adolescent Development: Parent-child interactions 2

3/19/2015

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A student brought in a paper that described Add Health results indicating that if a friend had an authoritative mother, the adolescent (not just the friend) was less likely to engage in binge drinking and other substance use than when a friend had a neglectful mother.

The papers students brought in were diverse, ranging from huge samples with Add Health to N =58 with observational and biological data. So, we had a discussion about the balance between putting resources into sampling representatively/using previously collected datasets vs. putting resources into measurement/collecting own sample and perhaps not having as representative a sample.

We also talked more generally about the value of observational data, which led me to spontaneously go down the hall to pull some tapes from my dissertation data to talk about whether parents and adolescents will really engage in conflict in a lab on videotape. Which accidentally led to watching Grad-Student-Eva on screen -- eek!

We also talked about what parents of teens should do to raise the ideal kid, but I’m sorry to report we didn’t come up with an amazing answer to share with you all.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Parent-child interactions 2 first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 19, 2015.”

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Ethical issues in peer review

3/3/2015

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The third topic we discussed during our class on ethical issues in publishing was peer review. I am not covering every topic here, as there are comprehensive papers on the topic already out there. Instead, I’m going to mention a few specific issues that we discussed:

Reviewing your own article. I imagine no one would try to argue it’s not an ethical violation to review your own article. And yet, people do it, by setting up fake gmail account and requesting that person as a reviewer. As an editor it must be great at first – many reviewers take a while to respond to a request to review, often say no, and then need to be nagged to return their review (what? I’m not necessarily describing myself…). But in this case, the author suggested a reviewer, who then returned a review almost immediately.

Conflict of interest. Sometimes it’s obvious that there’s a conflict of interest. You know you shouldn’t review papers by your colleagues, your current students, your spouse. But there are less clear lines. What about a paper by someone you were friends with in graduate school 17 years ago, for instance? A former student who has been working independently from you for decades? By the time you reach a certain point in your career, you know the majority of people working in a similar area, so you can’t excuse yourself every time you know the author. When in doubt, you can always get the editor’s advice on whether you should excuse yourself or not.

Confidentiality of authors. Much of the time, our reviews are double blinded, so we don’t know the author and the author doesn’t know us. Again, the field is relatively small, so sometimes even with double blinded review, we recognize the author by his sample or methods. If you don’t know who the author is, it wouldn’t be ethical to purposefully try to figure out who it is.

Confidentiality of reviewers. A paper that we read for class said that it was unethical for the reviewer to directly contact the author. I have never done so, nor have I ever felt the urge to do so. However, I do remember many years ago that a colleague said that she was given the same paper to review three times by three different journals. She said that each time the author failed to adequately direct her prior comments. So, she finally contacted the author, a junior scholar, to help her revise the paper and then eventually the author was able to publish it.

Reviewers requesting self-citation. Occasionally, an editor or reviewer will ask an author to cite him. I was recently at a professional development brown bag where a colleague said that he thought this practice was unethical, because the reviewer or editor has power in this situation. I tend to agree with this colleague. If an author has cited appropriate literature in an area, it’s best not to ask that he also cite you, even if you are slightly offended that your very important work wasn’t cited. The only exception I can think of is when an author says that there is no work in a particular area, and you have work in that area. In this case, I think it’s appropriate to direct the author to your work, and any other relevant work in this area.

Signing reviews. Soon after grad school, one of my grad school friends started signing all of his reviews. His logic was that he didn’t want to send anything that he wouldn’t say personally to someone. It was a great, laudable practice, but eventually he stopped because he felt that senior people were at times holding it against him.

We had a whole other class on manuscript reviewing more generally, so I’ll have more to say then. Until then, if you haven’t already seen it, a bit of peer review humor to help you survive this never-ending winter.

The post "Ethical issues in peer review first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz's blog on March 3, 2015."

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Excel tip #1: Counting # of words

Choosing a journal for submission

This week in Adolescent Development: Family context 2

This week in Adolescent Development: Parent-child interactions 2

Ethical issues in peer review

Eva S. Lefkowitz

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