From the Editor—On Peer Review: Improving the Credibility of Social Work Scholarship

Scholarly peer review is the process of having research and other scholarship submitted for the scrutiny of experts in the field to determine their opinion. JSWE and most other academic journals use blinded peer review to advise the editor on the relevance, coherence, and credibility of submitted manuscripts. We keep a list of more than 200 reviewers who represent a variety of social work programs, interest areas, and methodological foci.

To be a good reviewer, one must have the willingness to perform a review and the time to perform that task carefully and completely. Further, reviewers must have broad and deep knowledge of at least one problem area or at least one methodological approach (preferably both), enough self-awareness to remain unbiased in their criticisms of blinded manuscripts, sufficient writing skills to explain in detail how manuscripts need to be revised, and enough patient beneficence to word their criticisms as kindly as possible. I am extremely grateful to the many reviewers who consistently respond to our requests to review manuscripts, complete the reviews on time, and write thorough reviews that focus on a manuscript’s potential contribution to the field, its grounding in previous social work scholarship, the rigor and reproducibility of methods, and the logic of exposition.

On the other hand, some contributors who have submitted manuscripts to JSWE wait a longer time than they, or we, would like before learning whether the paper has been accepted. When I assumed the role of editor-in-chief, one of my personal goals for the journal was to reduce the time to make decisions because social work scholars, and in particular pretenure faculty members, need to be able to see their publications accepted for publication and in print. Although I have made some progress in this regard, we still experience some dismaying delays in the review progress, and much of this delay is because of the difficulty in finding reviewers for a given manuscript. Sometimes we need to ask more than five people on our list of reviewers before we can find someone to accept a manuscript based on the title and the abstract. Occasionally we need to ask even more potential reviewers if they will accept a manuscript.

Why is it sometimes so difficult to find a reviewer? Most of us would agree that faculty are busy people, and being a journal reviewer is not a priority. It might be that a manuscript does not seem interesting or might not be firmly in one’s substantive or methodological areas of expertise. If these reasons explain the difficulty in locating reviewers, then JSWE staff need to find ways to increase our pool of reviewers. Even if all social work faculty members served a 3-year term as a reviewer, the question of whether service as a reviewer is more work than it is worth would remain. Although many of us derive intrinsic rewards for reviewing manuscripts, such as keeping up with current research or seeing other reviewers’ comments about a manuscript, serving as a reviewer is usually seen by our fellow faculty members and our deans and directors as a service rather than as a scholarly activity. Because scholarship is generally weighed more heavily than service in evaluations of faculty performance, because the quality of peer review is important to social work scholarship, and because publication of social work scholarship is critical to the profession, we may need to reexamine incentives for serving as a peer reviewer.

If performance as a peer reviewer is to count as a part of social work scholarship, then we need to be able to appraise the quality of those activities. Because almost all social work publications use blinded review, in which reviewers’ and authors’ identities are not made public, scrutiny of performance is difficult to accomplish. To appraise the quality of reviewing, the process must be visible and accountable. Indeed, the effectiveness of open peer review, in which reviewers reveal their identity to manuscript authors, has been a topic of empirical study and debate since the 1990s (van Rooyen, Godlee, Evans, Black, & Smith, 1999). Although this approach has drawbacks (Almquist et al., 2017), the idea that the review products are subject to evaluation and improvement remains appealing. In the interest of improving the performance of reviewers, the scholarly community might consider developing strategies for evaluating the effectiveness of peer reviewers. Further, we might consider providing training and retraining opportunities for current or potential reviewers even perhaps as part of doctoral-level training. Do some of us already provide such evaluation and training? JSWE welcomes manuscript submissions about the peer review process, training peer reviewers, and increasing the quality of peer reviews.

This issue of JSWE offers a variety of empirical studies, teaching notes, and a field note. Of the three qualitative studies, Bogo, Lee, McKee, Ramjattan, and Baird’s “Bridging Class and Field: Field Instructors’ and Liaisons’ Reactions to Information About Students’ Baseline Performance Derived From Simulated Interviews,” examines the experiences and reactions of field instructors and faculty field liaisons to using their Objective Structured Clinical Examination to teach and assess student performance prior to entering field education. Akesson and Oba explore the use of comics in social work education in “Beyond Words: Comics in the Social Work Classroom,” arguing that this medium can help educators tackle complex social issues through the development of critical thinking and self-reflexivity in their students. The third qualitative study, “Empathy in Social Work,” by Eriksson and Englander, challenges the dominant conceptualization of empathy using interviews with professional social workers to support a view that empathy is constituted as a direct social perception of the other’s experience.

There are also two mixed-methods studies in this issue. Cotten and Thompson explore the concept of high-impact educational practices in preparing students for a progressively globalized employment marketplace and present a case study and evaluation of a short-term study abroad service-learning class in “High-Impact Practices in Social Work Education: A Short-Term Study-Abroad Service-Learning Trip to Guatemala.” Jensen presents a descriptive exploratory evaluation of how mentoring can be provided in an off-campus social work program in “Mentoring in a Distributed Learning Social Work Program.”

This issue also contains seven reports of quantitative studies. Miles, McBeath, Brockett, and Sorenson present a secondary analysis of a 2013 survey to provide an estimate of food insecurity and coping strategies among social work students in “Prevalence and Predictors of Social Work Student Food Insecurity.” Delavega, Kindle, Peterson, and Schwartz report on the development of a Blame Index to assess attributions of poverty along a single dimension of structural-to-individual causation in “The Blame Index: Exploring the Change in Social Work Students’ Perceptions of Poverty.” The Blame Index is used to evaluate the effectiveness of social work policy courses. Farmer evaluates a subscale to measure the CSWE-prescribed competency of identifying as a professional social worker and conducting oneself accordingly in “Examining the Psychometric Properties of the Identify as a Professional Social Worker Subscale.” Mauldin, Narendorf, and Mollhagen used social network analysis to investigate the formation of peer relationships among social work students in “Relationships Among Diverse Students in a Cohort-Based MSW Program: A Social Network Analysis.” Chenot and Kim examine the relationship between spirituality and religion and social justice orientation among young adults with differing career aspirations in “Spirituality, Religion, Social Justice Orientation, and the Career Aspirations of Young Adults.” Wood and Moylan explore the extent of training and knowledge about sexual harassment in social work field placements among BSW and MSW students in “‘No One Talked About It’: Social Work Field Placements and Sexual Harassment” and show that those receiving such training report feeling more prepared to address safety concerns in field. Finally, Almeida, O’Brien, Gironda, and Gross describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of a course on suicide in an MSW program in “Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Comprehensive Course on Suicide in a Master’s of Social Work Program.”

Finally, we have five teaching notes and one field note to round out this issue of JSWE. Kobayashi and Fitzgerald describe how a social work program at a regional public university collaborated with a large research university to develop a longitudinal, interprofessional education project for their MSW students in “Asserting Social Work’s Role in Developing an Interprofessional Education Project.” Sampson describes the challenges involved in implementating a student training and stipend program to prepare students for clinical behavioral health practice in integrated care in “Meeting the Demand for Behavioral Health Clinicians: Innovative Training Through the GLOBE Project.” Teixeira and Hash examine the use of Twitter for teaching macro human behavior in the social environment content in a BSW course in “Tweeting Macro Practice: Social Media in the Social Work Classroom.” Inoue et al. describe the use of the Social Work integrative Research Lab in “Creating an Integrative Research Learning Environment for BSW and MSW Students” to engage BSW and MSW students in meaningful social work research projects. Crowell describes the use of genograms to enable BSW students to detail the political and civic engagement of their family of origin in “Fostering Political Awareness in Students Through the Use of Genograms.” Finally, Deck, Miller, and Conley describe a field practicum seminar to help students clarify professional goals and secure postgraduation employment or other career advancement opportunities in “From MSW to J-O-B: Using Field Seminar to Prepare Students for Employment.”

Joanne Yaffe

Editor in Chief

https://ORCID.org/0000-0003-4874-6787