From the Editor—A Peer Review Crisis or New Normal?

It has been an unusual two and a half years dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the reckoning with racial injustice in the United States, and a deeply divided society. Academic faculty have experienced steeper workloads due to shifting teaching modalities, caregiving responsibilities, emotionally supporting and mentoring students, and adjusting research for pandemic restrictions. All these changes fall on top of the stressors we have experienced personally from these trying times. It is not surprising that in the aftermath of this worldwide pandemic and other societal stressors, academic faculty have needed some room to rest, recover, and even deal with burnout. As we recover, there is a need to prioritize the work that we value most. In addition to finding meaning in what we do and where we spend our time, it is also important—as with any disaster—to assess the damage and decide what we want to repair. As an editor, I want to highlight the recent crisis in peer review and ask you to consider or reconsider your participation in this process.

Like so many other vulnerabilities in societal systems laid bare during the pandemic, the delicate system of peer review that relies on the goodwill, and often free labor of our peers, has pushed this system to a potential breaking point (Dance, 2022; Flaherty, 2022). While there was an exponential increase in journal submissions in 2020 (Else, 2020) and reviews focused on COVID-19 were quicker and more responsive to start, timely peer review has become less reliable in the last year or so (Dance, 2022; Flaherty, 2022). The Journal of Social Work Education (JSWE) also experienced a larger number of submissions, and much fewer reviewers who were available for peer review in the last couple of years. If invited reviewers do not respond in a timely way, it can lengthen the peer-review process by several months. It has been sad to observe this process, particularly when I get e-mails from early-career colleagues who depend on timely peer review. As the editor of JSWE, there are times—especially during the pandemic and lately—where we invite eight or more people to review a paper before we secure reviewers. These experiences also hit home as an author. Within the last week, I received a returned manuscript held for 1 year with one of our primary professional journals with no peer review and a note from the editor that it was being released because no peer reviewers would accept it for review. This was particularly disheartening, as it was an article with two early-career colleagues.

I invite you to consider your commitment as a peer reviewer as we emerge into this new normal. Peer review is an opportunity to speak into the profession and minimize the chances that a small number of peers, often fewer experts with the necessary breadth of expertise and diverse backgrounds (Dance, 2022), are doing this alone. One prepandemic survey found one-fifth of researchers contribute up to 94% of the reviews (Kovanis et al., 2016). A small number of our peers cannot and should not so narrowly dictate the quality of our professional publications. The quality and validity of our profession’s research depends on high-quality review by experts in the field to catch important errors or problems, help peers improve their work, and reject work or scholarship that is not of high quality. Finally, one’s individual scholarship can benefit from ongoing and consistent peer review, with exposure to the new trends and ideas in a specific area of expertise and an opportunity to learn more from current peer-review practices.

I get it. We are all tired and maybe burned out. There has been a priority to focus on the tasks that are essential and considered for tenure, promotion, and merit. However, we must be collectively responsible for not just producing scholarship and research, but also ensuring its quality as a profession. While there is an argument that this work should be compensated (Dance, 2022), this is unlikely in the near future. As the editor of JSWE, my work is not compensated, but I find it an honor and deeply important to contribute to social work scholarship. If you have continued to be an active, consistent, and heroic reviewer during the pandemic, I am deeply grateful for your contributions. Now that we are in this new normal, if we all do our part, there is a chance that our delicate peer-review process can recover and perhaps even begin to thrive. I hope that schools of social work will consider including peer-review commitment as an essential part of tenure, promotion, and merit decisions. Service to peer review could be documented through Publons or copies of completed review confirmations, and perhaps the submission of written, deidentified reviews. I also hope that mentors will share with their mentees the value and importance of peer review and mentor them in high-quality review. The JSWE editorial board is currently discussing an early-career peer-review mentorship program. For now, if you are looking for an opportunity to participate in peer review, maintain or improve the quality and effect of JSWE and you have a beginning record of publication, I invite you to submit your new reviewer application.

Remembering Elizabeth Pomeroy

I would like to honor the memory of a dear mentor and colleague who recently passed away. Dr. Elizabeth Pomeroy held the Bert Krueger Smith Professorship in Mental Health and Aging and was director of the Institute for Grief, Loss and Family Survival at the University of Texas School of Social Work. She published several books in the areas of clinical social work and grief and loss, served as the editor-in-chief of the National Association of Social Workers’s Social Work journal, and as a member of the Journal of Social Work Education Editorial Advisory Board and the Council on Publications. More than all of this, she was a kind, generous and thoughtful person, educator, mentor, and beloved colleague. Beth, you are deeply missed.

This issue

This issue begins with an article by Spensberger, Kollar, and Pankofer titled “Effects of Worked Examples and External Scripts on Fallacy Recognition Skills: A Randomized Controlled Trial” that reports on the results of a randomized controlled trial that assessed the ways in which case-based reasoning, worked examples, and external scripts (individually and combined) might facilitate the learning of fallacy skills among social work students. In “‘I Know What I Know … Unless I Don’t”: Examining Faculty Knowledge About Social Work Licensing,” Miller, Bode, Adcock, Niu, and Freeman report on a study of social work faculty knowledge about social work licensing. Their findings suggest faculty with tenure and employed full time tended to overestimate knowledge of licensing compared with those who were employed part time as an adjunct. Allemang, Dimitropoulos, Collins, Gill, Fulton, McLaughlin, Ayala, Blaug, Judge-Stasiak, and Letkemann describe results of a qualitative study to assess the perceptions of Bachelor of Social Work and first-year Master of Social Work students of a role play activity designed to prepare them for the first field placement in “Role Plays to Enhance Readiness for Practicum: Perceptions of Graduate & Undergraduate Social Work Students.” Next, Notar reports on a qualitative study that explored the benefits of mindfulness practice and education as a part of a larger class on mindfulness practice, titled “Mindfulness 101: MSW Students’ Reflections on Developing a Personal Mindfulness Meditation Practice.”

In “Emerging Issues With Remote Faculty,” Toner, Reyes, Schwartz, Parga, and Ryan discuss the issue of online learning and best practices for remote faculty inclusion for administrators and schools, as well as future research recommendations. Findley, Isralowitz, and Reznik then report on a quantitative study of graduate social work students’ knowledge of medical marijuana in “Graduate Social Work Students’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Beliefs About Medical Marijuana.” Next, Hopkins, Meyer, and Afkinich share the results of their mixed-methods study with social work students who were taught organizational performance measurement in “Diversifying the Pipeline of Social Work Students Prepared to Implement Performance Measurement.” In “Contextualized Social Work Education: A Critical Understanding of the Local,” Schmid, Morgenshtern, and Turton report on a phenomenological study to understand the experience of Canadian and South African educators who were teaching a multidimensional, integrated, contextualized framework that focused on the power and resistance within the local context. Maglalang, Sangalang, Mitchell, Lechuga-Peña, and Nakaoka discuss the history of ethnic studies and offer recommendations for social work education in “The Movement for Ethnic Studies: A Tool of Resistance and Self-Determination for Social Work Education.” Next, Mooney and McGregor argue the importance of teaching social work students’ knowledge of law to ensure informed practice in “The Importance of Teaching Social Work as a Sociolegal Practice: An Irish Perspective.” In “Implementing a Large Scale Interprofessional Poverty Simulation,” Peterson, Hitchcock, Holt, Brown, and White describe their university’s experience implementing the Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS) for interprofessional learning among various healthcare professions. Finally, Daftary, Ortega, Sanders, and Hylton describe a case study where critical race theory is used to examine legislative transcripts for racialized interactions that influenced legislative processes in “A CRT Analysis of Policy Making in Nevada: A Case Study for Social Work Education.”

This issue is rounded out with five Teaching Notes and a Field Note. The first, by Kourgiantakis, Sewell, Sanders, Craig, and Bogo, describes a bridging Advanced Standing practice seminar that used simulation learning in “Preparing Advanced Standing Students for Social Work Practice.” Cheung then describes the use of miracle questioning in social work in “Miracle Questioning as a Teaching Tool in Social Work.” In “Witnessing Microaggressions: BSW Students’ Responses to Vignettes,” Mirick and Davis describe results of a qualitative study examining students’ perceptions vignettes of microaggressions from real social work classroom settings and how they should be addressed by witnesses. Next, Micsky describes the experiences of undergraduate social work students who had to terminate field education during the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons learned and new assignments, as well as recommendations for future research on termination in “Termination of the Social Work Process: Field Education and COVID-19.” In “Critical Issues in Sign Language Interpretation for Social Work Practice,” Abulhab and Pinto offer information to teach social work students to minimize communication barriers with D/deaf populations. Finally, this issue concludes with a Field Note, “Responding to the #MeToo Era in Social Work: A Policy for Sexual Harassment in Field,” in which Mennicke, Kulkarni, Ross, Ferrante-Fusilli, Valencia, Meehan, and Crocker describe the process taken by a school of social work to include a section in the field education policy to address sexual harassment in the field, as well as recommendations and lessons learned.