The Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (RQES) Lecture paper entitled “Educating Students for a Lifetime of Physical Activity: Enhancing Mindfulness, Motivation, and Meaning” is being published posthumously in this issue. Dr. Catherine D. Ennis, the author of the article, passed away on April 9, 2017, after a 2-year courageous battle against late-stage lung cancer. Dr. Ennis graduated from the Collegiate School in Richmond, VA, in 1971. She then attended Lynchburg College, where she received her bachelor of science degree in 1975, followed by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), where she received a master of science in physical education in 1977. Upon graduation, she was hired as head field hockey coach at Duke University, where she continued until leaving to pursue a Ph.D. in curriculum theory and development in kinesiology at the University of Georgia (1984). She held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Maryland–College Park before returning to UNCG as a professor of kinesiology in 2008.
Dr. Ennis was an outstanding teacher educator, scholar, and curriculum specialist, who conducted research examining physical education and physical activity programming in urban public schools. She received grants from the National Institutes of Health to design, implement, evaluate, and disseminate curricula to increase children’s and adolescents’ eagerness to participate in physical activity and to enhance their interest in learning the scientific basis of physical activity. She published several books and numerous research articles in academic journals to address critical issues in curriculum theory, development, and practice in kinesiology. She was a leader in our field, serving as the president of the National Academy of Kinesiology and president of the Research Consortium of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (AAHPERD, now SHAPE America – Society of Health and Physical Educators). More importantly, Dr. Ennis was an excellent mentor to her undergraduate and graduate students. She set high standards for them yet was always supportive in the face of difficulties they might encounter.
Dr. Ennis’s contributions to the field were widely recognized and rightfully honored. She was selected as the Alliance Scholar for AAHPERD in 2010. She was a fellow of the National Academy of Kinesiology and the American Educational Research Association. Among her many awards and recognitions, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the UNCG School of Health and Human Performance in 2009 and the Luther Halsey Gulick Medal in 2017—the highest award from SHAPE America for exemplifying the highest standards of accomplishment, innovation, and leadership in our profession. She was also chosen to give the 2017 RQES Lecture.
Because one of my responsibilities as the Editor-in-Chief of RQES is to publish every year’s RQES and C. H. McCloy Memorial Lecture papers in RQES, I talked with Dr. Ennis about her publication plan after her speech in March 2017. As always, she was well prepared and organized and told me that her manuscript was almost ready. So, I was shocked upon hearing the sad news of her passing just a few weeks after our meeting when she seemed to be healthy and strong. My first reaction was we must publish her lecture paper so that her thoughts and wisdom can be preserved. Right away, I contacted Dr. Ang Chen, a former student of Dr. Ennis and her colleague at the University of Maryland and UNCG, and happily found that Dr. Ennis had given her almost-ready manuscript to Dr. Chen.
The RQES editorial office and I also started to check how we should process a posthumous publication by a scholar or scientist in the RQES guideline and operation manual. Nothing was there, as expected. Fortunately, we found a good discussion on this topic by Teixeira Da Silva and Dobránszki (Citation2015), in which two key issues were addressed: (a) who will assume the authorship roles and responsibilities after the death of an author and (b) how errors in the literature should be corrected and what responsibilities coauthors or affiliations associated with deceased scientists should assume. Here is the key information we learned:
Due to the sensitivity of the topic, the authorship of a deceased scholar is usually not well addressed or even addressed at all in the journal publication guidelines.
The contribution of a deceased scholar should be recognized; therefore, authorship or coauthorship of a deceased scholar is acceptable.
Because the final version of a publication should be approved by all the authors, this requirement results in a great challenge in how to handle the authorship of a deceased scholar.
It is suggested that the coauthor(s), or the person(s) who submitted the work, of a deceased scholar should inform the journal of a deceased scholar’s role in the manuscript in their submission cover letter, as well as in an author note in the manuscript.
Although how to publish a deceased scholar’s work should be treated on a case-by-case basis, all journals need to develop a general guideline.
Based on this information, I decided to publish Dr. Ennis’s article with her as the original and sole author because she wrote the original manuscript that was handed over in essentially complete condition. Meanwhile, I decided to list Dr. Chen as the corresponding person for the article because he helped with the final publication process and is extremely familiar with Dr. Ennis’s scholarly work. I will work with the RQES editorial board to include specific instruction in the RQES author submission guidelines for when a deceased scholar is the author or a coauthor of a manuscript.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Matt Curtner-Smith at the University of Alabama and Dr. Philip Ward at the Ohio State University for reading Dr. Ennis’s manuscript and providing helpful comments for editorial revisions, as well as Dr. Chen for the great effort in putting the final vision of the article together. In addition to the original intent of publishing an RQES Lecture, this particular article and note also serve as RQES’s tribute to and represent our great respect for Dr. Ennis and her legacy. She will be missed.
Reference
- Teixeira Da Silva, J. A., & Dobránszki, J. (2015). The authorship of deceased scientists and their posthumous responsibilities. Science Editor, 38, 98–100.