Abstract
The peer review process was described in the previous editorial, especially the stages leading up to a paper being published in a journal such as Applied Earth Science. Some of the other forms of written geoscience reporting are discussed here.
The company report is a common medium in which to synthesise recent work, and is widely used within the mineral industry. The report preparation may be initiated by a manager, regarding a routine activity such as operational monthly reporting, or may be initiated by an individual who is proud of some recent advances on a project. Once complete, a company report preserves the findings in case of staff turnover, and allows the ideas to be disseminated within the company for others to use. At its best, a company report may be almost ready for publication but normally it has shortcomings. Limitations of the company report may include: the scrutiny of the data; the depth and validity of the arguments; and the quality of the writing. Poor quality data needs to be recognised and corrected. A poorly-reasoned report is likely to perpetuate errors of thinking through a company. It is common to find some topics well-covered, but other aspects of geoscience omitted because they are not the author's strengths despite being important for the overall story.
High quality company reports take time to complete, but the extra effort may in fact save time in the longer term. Poor writing means either unnecessary time is spent trying to understand a report, or it is simply not read when it could have been advantageous to do so. If management conveys the message that the quality of the report is not really important, the same leaders may then have difficulties arguing that quality anywhere else in their operation is important. However, if a young geoscientist takes time to learn how to write their first company report well, then they are likely to write well for the rest of their career: a little training early on can pay a lifelong dividend.
A high-quality company report may form the basis of further dissemination of the work. The next step might be to present the work at a conference either orally or as a poster. The presentation can be supplemented by an abstract, a long abstract, or a conference paper. In the process of making this work public, there will be a need to take questions from strangers who are being exposed to the work for the first time. This is a valuable stage to identify weaknesses in the data, faults in the logic, or lack of clarity explaining the story. The outcome might be humbling and suggest it is time to completely rethink, or encouraging and time to patch up some gaps. It is far better to learn at this stage that your work has a major flaw than to learn shortly after it has graced the cover of a journal such as Nature or Science!
The stage of writing up a few pages for a conference volume is commonly confused with peer-review publication in journals. Most conference papers and long abstracts are lightly filtered in order to remove grossly-poor science; there may be minor editing to ensure that the spelling and style match the volume standard. Rarely, an author will have their conference paper returned with a message to work on the science, and even less common would be any checking to ensure such an instruction was followed. The reality is that in assembling a conference volume there is usually insufficient time for the most valuable stage of the peer-review process, i.e. having scientific data and arguments reviewed and then the time and necessity to improve them. The reasons are easy to see:
Some submissions come in after the conference deadline and are so late that they are either accepted immediately, or else they simply do not appear in the volume,
Conference papers may be ‘reviewed’ by ad hoc groups of well-meaning people assembled for the occasion but with limited experience as either authors or reviewers,
Once reviewers make recommendations to improve conference papers, there is rarely any scientific oversight to ensure the necessary changes are made by authors.
Hence, conference papers do not meet the ‘peer’ word, are not always reviewed by qualified reviewers, and there is little editorial oversight to ensure reviewers’ recommendations are addressed. This does not devalue the importance of conference papers as a way to convey preliminary findings, but they should not be confused with journal articles.
Universities and granting agencies recognise the importance of the peer review process, the extra work involved, and the substantially higher standard of peer reviewed products. In the company setting, journal publication is an opportunity to convey a company's commitment to high class work, a chance to challenge a geologist to strive for better science and writing, and an occasion to recognise good project work through an invitation from management to write-up a story for a journal.
Neil Phillips
Editor