JOUR 101: Academic Journal Protocols

Answer all questions. Please.

Time allowed: four weeks. Six will be fine, actually, and to be honest, any time that suits you in the next three or four months will probably have to do. Just please do take the exam and send us your answers.

Part A: Referees

1. Provide an explanation, utilising a wide range of reasons, for why you have not delivered the referee report you agreed on time. Inventiveness of excuses may score extra points.

2. Critically assess why your guess that this author was, probably, a referee for your failed grant application two years ago led you to write a report of this animosity.

3. Three months ago you suggested that a paper was returned to the author with a ‘revise and resubmit’ decision. Why are you now unwilling to review the revision?

Part B: Authors

4. In 2013 your paper was conditionally accepted, subject to revisions. Please provide a justification for your decision not to actually make those revisions, nor to withdraw the paper from the journal.

5. To what extent was your decision not to resubmit your manuscript a reflection on referee E’s comments?

6. Critically discuss the difference between a) agreeing to do a book review, receiving the book, and not delivering the review; and b) theft.