Measuring the Quality of Peer-Reviewed Publications in Social Work: Impact Factors—Liberation or Liability?

Systems for measuring the quality of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals have achieved importance in the ‘audit culture’ to which academia worldwide has become increasingly subjected. In the United Kingdom this debate has focused on government proposals to give greater emphasis to bibliometrics (counts of journal articles and their citations) as a measurement of research quality, in respect of publications in the emergent Research Excellence Framework (REF) which is set to replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This approach impacts on social work educators who are the main producers of papers published in peer-reviewed academic journals. It affects their publishing behaviour by pressurising them to publish their work in journals that are regarded as being prestigious, for which ‘high impact factor’ journals as determined by Thomson Reuters—a private commercial information management enterprise with headquarters in the United States—has become a proxy for quality. In this paper the authors describe and critique the Thomson Reuters system as it applies to social work and propose an alternate fair, inclusive and transparent system for assessing the quality of publications based on peer evaluation and incorporating an ethical approach consistent with the discipline's professional values.     

Student supervision

In October 1967 Sydney was the venue for the Annual Conference of The Australian Group for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency, the theme being “Preparing the Mentally Retarded for Adult Life”. A small group of students under the supervision of Mary McLelland¹ of Sydney University undertook a pilot study of the problems of the adolescent retarded, and the results of this were reported by her at a session of the conference. The subject was chosen because of direct and indirect pleas for help from parents of adolescent retarded people, mainly through the organization known as Aid Retarded Persons. Discussions and talks had taken place over a couple of years, and it is of this pre-conference thinking I am now writing. Parts of the material were given in talks to the parents and to a special group of the A.M.A.     

Physical activity patterns in healthy middle-aged women

ABSTRACT

Exercise in healthy female adults around the menopausal transition has been routinely examined in leisure activities alone, potentially discounting the physical activity (PA) that is accumulated in household and outdoor domains. The purpose of this study was to quantify PA in healthy middle-aged women and to examine the extent to which the Center for Disease Control (CDC) PA guidelines were met through leisure, household, and outdoor activities. Methods: 440 healthy women, 51–64 years old, BMI ≥18.5 or < 40 kg/m², participated in the study using the Lifetime Physical Activity Questionnaire (LPAQ) to quantify PA. Results: 25.91% met the CDC PA guidelines if leisure time alone was examined. When multiple domains were included, 73.41% of the women met the PA guidelines. This percentage is much higher than the reported 20.6% of U.S. adults who met the guidelines in 2011. PA in women may be underrepresented in data limited to leisure time PA.     

A taste of trade justice: marketing global social responsibility via Fair Trade coffee

The movement to certify and promote fairly traded coffee is one of many efforts aimed at linking social responsibility and free market capitalism. In the wake of a worldwide crisis in which coffee prices have fallen to levels that do not support small-scale production, non-profit Fair Trade certifying and labeling organizations are working to develop a market situation that is sustainable for workers and the environment. The Fair Trade system promotes living wages for farmers, access to affordable credit, and the adoption and maintenance of environmentally sound practices. Fair Traders' marketing efforts seek to influence cultural and political values in such a way that consumers and corporations will have to respond to them by incorporating the welfare of Southern workers into their purchasing decisions. This article discusses and evaluates current strategies for creating and expanding the market for Fair Trade-certified coffee and their outcomes in the United States and Europe. We argue that, while Fair Traders have achieved some laudable goals, they must now address the limits to supply-driven marketing efforts.     

Unethical Aspects of Open Access

ABSTRACT

In this article, we identify and discuss several ethically problematic aspects of open access scientific publishing. We conclude that, despite some positive effects, paid open access has at least three unethical aspects: it discriminates against researchers, creates an editorial conflict of interest, and diverts funding from the actual conduct of research. To be truly open access, all researchers must be able to access its benefits.     

Efficient Algorithms for Similarity Search

The problem of our interest takes as input a database of m sequences from an alphabet and an integer k. The goal is to report all the pairs of sequences that have a matching subsequence of length at least k. We employ two algorithms to solve this problem. The first algorithm is based on sorting and the second is based on generalized suffix trees. We provide experimental data comparing the performances of these algorithms. The generalized suffix tree based algorithm performs better than the sorting based algorithm.     

Safety in commercial aviation—The long-term trends

The Technical Department of IATA is primarily responsible for presenting coordinated airline views to governments, and government organizations like the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), on airline requirements for ground-based facilities such as airports, air traffic control, communications, meteorological services, and so on. The objective is always to improve the safety, efficiency and economics of the airlines' commercial services.

All these activities involve the issue of safety to some degree or other. However, about 12 years ago IATA decided to establish a separate safety activity in order to give more explicit attention to the overall safety level of the industry. This paper outlines IATA's safety activities, some of the conclusions which have been drawn, the steps being taken to improve the past safety record, and the prospect of success in this activity.