Updating a Paper on Perceived Skill Gaps

• John Vandivier

I updated this article with stream notes following the streaming of part 6 and part 7. View the saved stream on Twitch or YouTube.

Twitch also has some short highlight clips:

Agenda:

  1. Review the present agenda
  2. Against Carr's How to Write a Paper in a Weekend
    1. This is supposed to be advice on a journal paper or a research paper, not just a school paper. The latter can be done. Here's a good video on that.
    2. Steps:
      1. Gather data. This will take at least a day and potentially years.
      2. Analyze data. If you don't give it at least a day you are probably missing something.
      3. Draft paper.
        1. If you draft before the analysis is complete you will anchor your analysis and need to rework the draft anyway. Leave yourself notes during analysis but don't draft until done.
        2. While drafting the paper you may discover new analytical concerns, causing a bit of a cycle between stages 2 and 3. This is great! It also takes time.
      4. Get feedback. If nothing else, sleep a day or two and come back to the paper fed, rested, and with a clear head.
        1. You could just submit to a journal and hope they give you feedback but this is a slow and expensive way to get feedback.
        2. If you are submitting to a journal in order to get feedback and not because you think your paper is already journal-ready, I don't consider that a real submission anyway. It's an expensive drafting stage.
      5. Revise on the basis of the above.
      6. Journal selection and revision for journal fit. Intensive grammar review. Technical submission.
    3. Those steps above really ought to take at least a full week to let a paper breathe and genuinely go through multiple iterations which assures due diligence has been done. It is technically possible to follow 1 instead of the steps in 2 and then submit a low-quality paper written overnight to a journal, and hilariously enough it might even get published, but I don't recommend that process and I think it is in expectation a low return on investment approach.
  3. Review prior stream (pt 5)
  4. What has been done since last stream (pt 5): file-by-file walkthrough
  5. section-by-section paper walkthrough
    1. Revise on-the-go as needed for all parts including this one and later
  6. Grammarly updating (90 percentile minimum to submit)
  7. journal targeting
    1. publishability chances and journal fit
    2. length
    3. abstract
    4. figures/tables
  8. Top to bottom walkthrough again given above changes
  9. Collate and resolve peer review feedback. Anticipated issues include:
    1. grammar/wording/spelling
    2. lack of journal target
    3. lack of attached abstract
    4. poor/unconvincing conscientiousness explanation
    5. poor/unconvincing rulebreaker explanation
    6. should have explored nonlinear factors more
    7. fail to explain attractiveness bias anchoring; the intent was a non-skill or irrelevant anchor
    8. personality, salary, and some other section 2 factors aren't really skills.
    9. overfit; horse racing dependent variable and kitchen sink + round-robin model identification
    10. weak conclusion
    11. extraneous information or poor section organization making it seem extraneous or out of place
  10. Probable break and then top to bottom review on a different day with fresh eyes. Submission package.

Working notes:

  1. p-value is terrible: https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/03/p-values
  2. Cabell Scholarly Analytics link in this paper: https://www.afterecon.com/economics-and-finance/preparing-to-submit-my-first-academic-paper/
  3. builds on kitchen sink link: https://www.afterecon.com/economics-and-finance/three-exceptions-in-systematic-model-derivation/
  4. journals to be considered:
    1. keywords or categories based on content: economics, applied econ, business, Management, organizational psychology, industrial psychology, education, alternative education.
    2. Cabells results for journals using keyword or category search:
      1. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 2-3, 80%, 46, 30+ page length
      2. American Psychologist, 1-2, 26%, 37
      3. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 3-6, 36%, 33
      4. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2-3, 13%, 21.
      5. Education Economics, 3-6, 27%, 21
      6. Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice, 1-2, 21-30, 23.
      7. Educational Research Review, 1-2, 19%, 135.
      8. The Economic Record, 2-3, 36%, 10
      9. Economics of Education Review, 2-3, 20%, 46
      10. Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning, 1, 48%, 19
    1. Cabells results for journals from bibfile:
      1. Education + Training, 2-3 months, 36% accepted, 46 mentions.
      2. Applied Economics, 3-6, 25%, 13.
      3. Applied Economics Letters, 1-2, 24%, 9.
      4. Applied Economics Quarterly, 2-3, 20%, 8.
      5. Industrial and Commercial Training, 1-2 months, 41% accepted, 35 mentions.
  5. Collated feedback:
    1. Revamp abstract.
    2. Better Table 1 explanation

TODO:

  1. blog my kids name meaning
  2. upgrade to streamlabs obs pro
  3. submission package
  4. rename the second stream pt 6 vids as part 7 on youtube and twitch
  5. check streamlabs framerate settings
  6. maybe switch order of table 1 and table 2; isolate effect groups after preferred model identification

Top 10 publications in preferred order when weighted for time to review and chance of acceptance:

  1. Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning
  2. Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice
  3. Educational Research Review
  4. Industrial and Commercial Training
  5. Education + Training
  6. Applied Economics Letters
  7. Economics of Education Review
  8. The Economic Record
  9. (I would merge with 'gap of gaps' paper into a long paper) Advances in Developing Human Resources

One tricky issue here is that altmetric mentions are arguably not a good impact or journal quality metric. I have recently chosen to use the H-Index. Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning has an altmetric of 19 mentions compared to Applied Economics Letters which has a value of 9 for the measure. I know AEL is reputable in the category of economics journals, but I don't know about the other journal which is in another field. I know altmetrics vary importantly by field.

I have recently found that \"Hirsch reckons that after 20 years of research, an h index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.\" This seems to be a statement across the lines of academic field. Therefore, I prefer to weight using this measure of quality over altmetric. I'm not sure whether impact factor or something else would be even better.

I personally think Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning is a great journal fit, but I'm given pause by the low H-Index and the fact that my committee might prefer publication in a better journal. That being said, if the highest criticism of my committee is that I could have been published in a better journal, that would be a nice criticism to receive. I'll give the economics journals two tries before going elsewhere because I'd like to get published before the end of the year. My finalized order of journal publication attempt is:

  1. Economics Letters
  2. Economics of Education Review
  3. Educational Research Review
  4. Applied Economics Letters
  5. Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning
  6. Education + Training
  7. Industrial and Commercial Training