a case of conflicting reviewer comments

A nice discussion of what to do with conflicting reviewer comments:

https://patthomson.net/2013/05/27/a-case-of-conflicting-reviewer-comments/

Acceptance

You will find that instances may occur during your professional career when you too must accept some difficult news. A common one for authors are that a reviewer wants more revisions. Fighting such things, kicking and screaming, simply does not change the inevitable. You must accept there are times when you must put up with delays.

The feeling of a lack of control can be frustrating, painful, and make you angry or depressed. It can stop you in your tracks and make you throw things at the computer. It doesn’t help. The sooner you can accept that this too is a part of life and the process of getting published, the sooner you can move forward. Take it one step at a time and claim what control that you can. What step can you do today? Even if it is nothing more than making a list, take the next baby step toward acceptance.

Researcher Interview: Dr. Jesus Tanguma

1. Please briefly describe your current research.

Currently working on several projects; for example, why do researchers use language such as highly significant, approaching significance, almost significant, etc. when the results of any hypothesis testing are simply to reject or not reject the null hypothesis. Along with that, describe fallacies in hypothesis testing commonly used/found in published articles.

Another project I am working is a compilation of statistical techniques commonly used in published articles and cross reference such techniques against those taught to students in graduate school.

Structural equations modeling is a very interesting  technique; however, not all published articles where it is used report the same fit indices…thus, I am interested in a project to present the most commonly used SEM fit indices, and whether such fit indices are the most appropriate ones.

Finally, I am working with students, who have already graduated/PhD, on re-writing their dissertations and submitting to journals for possible publications.  

2 How did you come to be in this area of study?

By knowing the correct language to use, practitioners might have a better way to apply the research findings.

By cross referencing what techniques are being used in published research against what students are taught in graduate school, schools will better equipped its graduates.

Students’ dissertations have the potential to help society. 

3. What do like best about doing research?

Increase my knowledge, let the world know of what is proper/correct to say/use/do…help my students publish, just as my professors helped me get published.

4. What do you dislike the most about doing research?

Not being able to research all the topics I have in mind.

5. Advice for new researchers who would like to be published?

Find topics that you like, but will also fill gaps in the literature.

Enjoy what you research about.

And, when your paper gets rejected (because it will), do not take it personally…they do not know you, they do not know anything about you, they are just doing their job. Instead, regroup, rewrite, and resubmit.

Tables and Figures

Recently an author asked me "how many tables and figures should I have in my paper?" This is another of those tough questions for which it is hard to provide a firm rule. The APA manual states that you should "limit the content of your tables to essential materials" (section 5.07). This means you should only include information that is cumbersome or confusing if written in text. A couple of examples are demographics and correlation tables, which are often clearer in table format than explained in text. Below is an example of a demographics table from a qualitative study (Clark, 2013).

Table 1. Summary of Demographics

Participants	Gender	Age	Time attending community college
Participant 1	Female	62	3 years
Participant 2	Female	57	1 online class
Participant 3	Female	55	4 classes
Participant 4	Female	54	2 years
Participant 5	Male	50	2.5 years
Participant 6	Female	52	3 years
Participant 7	Male	51	1 year
Participant 8	Female	59	4 years
Participant 9	Female	59	3 years
Participant10	Female	62	7 years
Participant11	Male	58	2 years

Note. The mean age of the participants was 56.2 years.

What about figures (graphs)? These should be used very sparingly. The only time I recommend the use of a figure is for a quantitative study that had an interaction effect, it is typically easier to understand if presented in a graph. Here is an example from Stadtlander, Giles and Sickel (2013, p.128).

As shown in Figure 1, there was an interaction effect (F [1, 14] = 13.25, p < .01), whereby the lab group showed a greater knowledge gain over the four periods as compared to the comparison group.

Figure 1: Research Knowledge Test Scores Interaction Effect for Lab and Comparison Students

Clark, L. (2013). Older Adult Community College Students' Perceptions of Readiness for Learning Online. Walden University Doctoral Dissertation. 

Stadtlander, L., Giles, M. & Sickel, A. (2013).  The Virtual Research Lab: Research Outcomes Expectations, Research Knowledge, and the Graduate Student Experience. Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 3(1), 120-138.

Researcher Interview: Dr. John Agnew

Dr. Agnew is a faculty member at Walden University and a reviewer for JSBHS

1. Please briefly describe your current research.

Most recently, my research has attempted to understand behavioral aspects of autism and develop behavioral interventions that may improve the quality of life for children with autism and their families. As part of this research, I have been involved with studies of repetitive behaviors in autism spectrum disorders; biomarkers, such as salivary cortisol; and behavioral interventions, such as therapeutic horseback riding. In this last study, 116 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder were enrolled in a randomized control trial, half receiving the horseback riding intervention and half receiving a small group intervention at the same facility that did not involve horseback riding. The primary outcome measure was aberrant behaviors, but we also assessed social measures and communication abilities. The results of this study indicated that 10 weeks of therapeutic horseback riding significantly improved aberrant behaviors and some social measures in the treatment group compared with the control group. Further analysis suggested that the improvements in the aberrant behaviors remained for a period of months after the treatment ended. These results suggest that therapeutic horseback riding may be an effective behavioral treatment for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. This work has been published as:

Gabriels, R. L., Pan, Z., Dechant, B., Agnew, J. A., Brim, N., & Mesibov, G. (2015). Randomized controlled trial of therapeutic horseback riding in children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 54(7), 541 - 549. doi: 10.1016/j.jaac.2015.04.007

2 How did you come to be in this area of study?

Prior to becoming involved in autism research, my research in graduate school involved functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of developmental dyslexia. While at Georgetown University, I developed a behavioral task in which subjects moved their thumb in time with a visual stimulus while monitoring their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. By comparing the neural activity between subjects with dyslexia and neurotypical controls, I was able to show differences in the patterns of brain activity between the two groups.

3. What do like best about doing research?

What I like about research and about neuroscience in general, is that there is so much about the brain that we do not yet know or understand. This field is a very active one, and new findings are published every day. These may be at the chemical level, identifying chemicals that are important for brain communication and development; at the level of brain anatomy, where researchers have just recently discovered nearly 100 brain regions that were previously unknown; or at the clinical level, such as my research into behavioral therapies for autism spectrum disorders. Research is what helps expand our understanding of these systems and conditions and, by doing research, we can help others.

4. What do you dislike the most about doing research?

While research can be very rewarding, research also can be very frustrating. Most biomedical research in the United States is funded by the NIH, and grant funding levels have fallen dramatically in recent years. That means that less research can be accomplished and fewer students will be able to fund their graduate education or early careers in research science. That is concerning both for research today and research in the coming years, as people leave science for other fields. Beyond funding concerns, research can be frustrating because experiments do not always result in what you expected to find. But, that is the process of science. Even if the experiment does not work out, it does often generate new questions to address in the next experiment.

5. Advice for new researchers who would like to be published?

Be detailed. Be persistent. Taking those in order, science is a very precise field. You need to understand the question you are asking and the measurements you are making. The history of science is littered with experimental results that seemed to point to one conclusion, but actually said something very different once the question was better understood. So be detailed and specific about what you are asking and what you are measuring. Second, be persistent. It takes a long time and many attempts to have your grant funded or your journal article accepted. Personally, I have never been successful on the first attempt at either. Just review the feedback you receive and implement that into your next attempt. The feedback is meant as constructive criticism to help you clarify your thinking and your writing. I will add one more piece of advice for publishing your manuscript. When you have your research completed and analyzed, start to think about where you might want to publish. Each journal has a focus, so you need to identify how you want to present your research and find a journal that publishes about that topic and to the audience you think will benefit from your study. Then, read several articles from that journal and work to match the style as much as you can. Do they follow APA format, MLA format, or some other format for the manuscript and references? How do they use headings and tables and figures? Complying with the style guidelines of the journal is a good first step to show the editor and the reviewers that you have paid attention to the details and that they should take your work seriously.