Hi Victor,

Are you claiming that, in general, an editor  filters out the faulty or
lower quality papers better than selected experts from the field?

This implies the editor is some sort of expert god over and above those
reporting their research. Is that what you are claiming?

Best,

Terry


  

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Victor
Margolin
Sent: Wednesday, 25 June 2008 3:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: journal reviews

Hi Terry;
Thanks for your post. It looks like we are at opposite ends of the spectrum
on the double blind review issue. If design research or design studies were
a discipline like organic chemistry or topology where the same basic
knowledge was equally distributed among all the members and there was a
widespread consensus on competency, well, a blind review might work because
the standards of the field would be quite clear. But, to the contrary,
design research seems to be working too hard often to follow the wrong
model. Design is a contingent practice and there is, despite arguments to
the contrary, no common knowledge base among design researchers that would
insure that all research was of so called "quality." As I mentioned in my
initial response to Gavin, the top journals in the field of design research
do not uniformly adhere to a policy of double blind review and they are none
the worse off for it. In fact, the requirement to review all articles in a
similar way produces a draconian constraint on what a journal might publish.
Design Issues, for example, the journal with which I have been associated
for 25 years, publishes a variety of pieces ranging from scholarly articles
to personal essays. 
It is our contention that the multiple forms of writing contribute to a
broad discourse on designing and its consequences. If design is a contingent
practice, why should design discourse not be the same? As to quality, would
anyone say that the Partisan Review was not a publication of quality and
that it did not contribute sufficiently to the multiple fields of politics
and culture? It owes its success over many years to several editors
including Philip Rahv. There is much to be said for seasoned editors, along
with an advisory board of specialist experts, having the capability to make
decisions about the quality of an article. In fact, if we were to
deconstruct the whole double blind review we would have to say the
following:
1) reviewers have particular prejudices and often reject articles because
they do not agree with the author's point of view
2) reviewers can sometimes guess who wrote a particular article and thus
review it on a personal basis
3) a reviewer may have more ego involved in reviewing an article than an
editor
4) a reviewer may not be competent to review an article even though chosen
for the job I could go on. Mainly, I would argue that the idea that blind
reviews produce better quality than other ways of choosing articles is a
myth that completely undermines the assumption that an experienced editor
will be sufficiently competent if not more so than a chosen reviewer.
The danger of a so called objective review process is that all the credit or
value is given to those journals that conform to the process even if they do
not actually produce better quality work. An additional problem is that
scholars may not get promoted unless they adhere to these abstract national
criteria. I remember some years ago when I was a visiting professor at UTS
in Sydney and I heard that Eva Cox, a distinguished internationally known
scholar at the university, got less academic credit for delivering the
prestigious series of Boyer Lectures, sponsored by the Australian
Broadcasting Company, than one would get for a paper in a refereed journal.
In my opinion, a review body adopts so called measurable standards to
ascertain excellence when it does not have enough confidence to judge
quality by other means. Could you develop a measurable standard for the
articles in the Partisan Review or the New Yorker or the London Times
Literary Supplement? I doubt it. So called measures of quality are intended
for people who have no knowledge of a field and must rely on some mythic
objectivity to make themselves feel good about their decision-making.
Also, I am not sure what old boy networks you refer to that have clogged up
design research. The journals I am aware of, including The Design Journal
started by Rachel Cooper, are not such publications and I see a generally
open field when it comes to publishing. Design Issues, for example, has
published articles by scholars from at least thirty countries if not more,
many of them by young scholars. So, to finish up, I see the mechanical
imposition of reviewing standards as a practice that will inhibit or fail to
reward quality scholarship and thought in general that does not fit into a
mold. I'd be interested to hear an argument to the contrary.
Victor Margolin
Co-editor, Design Issues
--
Victor Margolin
Professor Emeritus of Design History
Department of Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
935 W. Harrison St.
Chicago, IL 60607-7039
Tel. 1-312-583-0608
Fax 1-312-413-2460
website: www.uic.edu/~victor