In addition to editing Education & Self Development I am on the reviewer panel for
other journals in the field. I never begrudge the work involved in reviewing: it gives me
insights into what other researchers are thinking, long before their work reaches the stage
of being published. It also gives me a way of moderating the reviewing activities of E&SD
so that we are matching the standards of other journals.
This piece was prompted by a discussion between the authors and reviewers of an
article submitted to one of these journals. It concerned the recency of the references and
I recalled that on several occasions over the past few months, submissions to E&SD had
been criticised because many of the references were ‘old’ – that is, published more than
ten years ago. It is a simple matter to read through the list of references and count the
number that are more than, say, ten years old, but that does not necessarily mean that
they do not have value. In contrast to high energy particle physics, our field of education
and psychology moves relatively slowly.