Roundtable Discussion, Part I - Moderator - Catherine Emihovich, University of Florida

DR. EMIHOVICH: I would like to welcome everybody to the second part of this workshop, which is a roundtable discussion with some journal editors around the issue of using structured abstracts, the nature and quality of them, how is it that they influence what is done in journals, how they think about the reporting out of information, and how does it relate to the nature and the standards of the work itself.

My name is Catherine Emihovich. I'm from the University of Florida. Today we have four very distinguished current and past editors of major educational and social science research journals. I'm going to have each one of them introduce themselves very briefly, name, rank, serial number, sort of like a structured introduction. You have the more complete biographies in your packet of people who all have extremely distinguished careers, and we don't want to lose that information, but we do have it available for you to see.

And can see that what we have is they have been asked to consider a number of framing questions in terms of the use of structured abstracts. But I thought what I would like to do is rather than necessarily follow the order of those questions, and not to say that any one of those is of lesser importance than the others, because I think they are all equally important.

But rather to sort of jump ahead to one of the latter questions based on some of the remarks that were made earlier today already in this session around some of the more substantive issues that the use of structured abstracts raises. And in the answering of that question, then I'm sure that the editors will go back and pick up some of the other issues as well, and incorporate that into their remarks.

And the model is going to be very interactive among the four panelists in the sense that it isn't going to be a sort of a set presentation by any particular person, but rather each one can begin to address it in the context of what they are doing, but play off one another in a real conversation about how this works, just as if we had four working editors in a room discussing structured abstracts.

So, I would have each of the panels introduce themselves first.

DR. FLODEN: Thanks, Catherine.

I'm Bob Floden. I'm at Michigan State University. I'm currently the editor of Review of Research in Education, not to be confused with the Review of Educational Research. This is the one that is more of a book form, and takes the form of essays. And I'm probably unique here in being the editor of a journal that has no abstracts period.

DR. MC CARTY: I'm Teresa McCarty. I'm Professor of Education Policy Studies at Arizona State University, and I'm editor of Anthropology in Education Quarterly.

DR. WALTERS: Hi, I'm Pamela Walters. I'm the Snell Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, and past editor of Sociology of Education from 1995-1998. And we do have abstracts.

DR. WONG: I'm Kenneth Wong. I'm from Vanderbilt University, a professor in public policy, political science, and education, and also the new Director of the IDS-funded Center on School Choice. I'm the co-editor of Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and I have been a board member of the Educational Researcher for a number of years.

DR. EMIHOVICH: Thank you.

And just to sort of keep it in the context of people giving their credentials, I'm the former editor of Anthropology in Education Quarterly. So, I share with Terri, a deep interest in how this issue plays out with reference to research done in the anthropological world.

We kind had a couple of audience members raise some very interesting questions around the way that these abstracts may act in the sense -- and I think Norm used the term "straightjacket," a way of constraining the way information is disseminated through journals, or the nature of the research itself.

And I would like to start there with asking each one of these panelists to begin to think about that question in relation to their own field and the work that is reported in their journals. You can start anywhere.