238 ◆AUTHORING A PHD
readership in professionally related fields. Editors of this
kind of journal will not want to run material that only
people with PhDs in the discipline care about or can
understand.A typical journal will use most but not all of the criteria
shown in Figure 9.1. So to this extent my composite form may
overstate the difficulty of getting your work published. But on
the other hand, top journals in each field are likely to require
that a paper be judged ‘good, above average’ or ‘outstanding’
on around half their editorial criteria, and without attracting
any ‘poor’ scores. Getting agreement on this from four, three or
even two referees is often a challenge.
Yet despite the elaborate refereeing procedures most academ-
ics will readily acknowledge that contemporary journals contain
a lot of routine papers. How great this proportion actually is will
no doubt vary from subject to subject. And perhaps there may
be difficulty in securing agreement about which papers fall into
this category. One now rather dated but still interesting attempt
at systematically assessing the value of journal papers looked at
those dealing with the psychology of memory and verbal learn-
ing. The authors (E. Tulving and S. A. Madigan) found that two
thirds of papers were ‘inconsequential’.^5 They then classified a
further quarter of their sample of papers as ‘ “run-of-the-mill”,
they represent technically competent variations on well-known
themes’. The routine and unimportant papers usually offered
‘one or more of the following conclusions:
(a) variable X has an effect on variable Y;
(b) the findings do not appear to be entirely inconsistent
with the ABC theory;
(c) the findings suggest a need for revising the ABC theory
(although no inkling is provided as to how);
(d) processes under study are extremely complex and cannot
be readily understood;
(e) the experiment clearly demonstrates the need for further
research on this problem;
(f) the experiment shows that the method used is useful for
doing experiments of this type;
(g) the results do not support the hypothesis, but the
experiment now appears to be an inadequate test of it.’