Roundtable Participant: Bob Floden, Editor, Review of Research in Education

DR. FLODEN: Having no abstracts, I feel I'm constrained. Review of Research in Education publishes reviews on a wide variety of subjects, and across all sorts of genres. Some are from critical theory, others work based on empirical work, looking at interventions, sociological studies, philosophical work, statistical and methodological things.

And I have to say when I started participating in this, I thought that one of the things I should have done on taking the job of editor was start the process for introducing the idea of abstracts for the articles, not perhaps structured abstracts, because I hadn't thought of that before, but the idea that you should be able in looking at an article, and have something more than the title to go by, particularly when people don't always pick titles to be descriptive, but as a sort of invitation to read the piece, and something to pique your interest which may have little to do with the substance of what's actually in the article.

It is sort to be against the idea of having some sort of an abstract as a way to give the reader to decide whether or not they want to look further at the article. Given that, and given the range of things that are in the journal that I edit, I look at this list of nine things, and I actually think this list, most of them are so general, that they wouldn't be very constraining at all.

So, Nancy was saying what about pieces in philosophy? Well, if you had to say something about the purpose, objective, research question, or focus, that is such a broad categorization of things that it would seem not to constrain what it is you were going to talk about at all.

So, the ones up here that are like that, and perhaps the first one on background and research design, which you could say none. If it was not a particular research study, it would not be terribly constraining. This list is slanted towards a particular kind of research, and I think if we are going to have things from my journal, across the range, you didn't want to have people saying none too often.

You would want to have a list that included our or five different things that would give people a sense of what the article was about, and would remind the author that they are supposed to help the reader see that, would be a good sort of thing.