Bradley2010
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Dale sent two reports. They are attached.
CJC-review-editor-report-2010.pdf
cjc-rev-ed-report-2010-chart.pdf
Canadian Journal of Communication: Review Editor's Yearly Report
Vol. 34, Nos 1-4, 2009 Dale Bradley, Brock University May 6, 2010
Members of the board,
I am pleased to say that 2009 was another good year in terms of reviews. As you know, I have to step down as the book review editor this year due to administrative commitments. I have thus taken the liberty of presenting my report as a series of what I hope will be helpful suggestions for the incoming review editor (suggestions are in italics). I have also kept my comments limited to a few key areas rather than summarize the past year’s bureaucratic minutiae.
CanCon? & French Language Reviews
I am happy to report that Canadian publishers have finally become more proactive with regard to notifying the CJC of new publications by Canadian authors. It seems that the Journal is now very much “on their radar”. This has enabled me to increase the number of Canadian books reviewed to just under half for the current volume. Given the relatively high turnover rate of publisher’s representatives, constant reminders are necessary in order to keep us high on their list of ‘go-to’ journals for reviews.
It would also appear that we have caught the eye of French language publishers (UQAM in particular) and this is a welcome development. As a (sadly) uni-lingual person it has been a bit difficult for me to assess the books and converse with reviewers. It might be a good idea to have a bi-lingual review editor in the future in order to better attract, assess, edit, and converse with francophone authors/ publishers/reviewers. He said, obsolescing himself...
Specially themed issues
This year saw 3 out of 4 issues being devoted to special themes. I think that these issues are a great idea but they do introduce a few minor problems with regard to reviews. Special issues are, I think, best deployed with similarly themed reviews. We have managed to do this but a side effect has been that many completed reviews end up ‘on hold’ for a fairly long time awaiting a non-themed issue. This hasn’t been a major problem by any means. Those reviewers who had to wait a while for their work to be published have been very gracious about it (and those who were tardy caught a bit of a break...). As noted, this is a minor problem but I do have a few suggestions that may prove useful to a future review editor:
• Having the guest editor(s) for the special issues involved in the reviews is a great benefit. Thanks again to Josh Greenberg for his assistance on the PR issue! Reviewers are far more motivated (and deadline-aware) when involved with special issues and it seems to me that review requests are taken more seriously when they come from the guest editor and followed up by the review editor.
• Knowing the roster and dates of special issues as far in advance as possible is a great aid in terms of scheduling reviews. Kim and Marilyn have been very good about this. If two special issues appear in succession, hold off on sending out new review requests until the first issue comes out. Spend that time tormenting tardy reviewers to get their reviews in rather than seeking new reviews. The tardy have no excuse and their lateness provides guilt-based leverage. This tends to prevent building up too much of a backlog of completed reviews that don’t fit specially themed issues.
Review notifications & guidelines
We tried a few different things with regard to making potential reviewers aware of what was available for review. The website that I created worked fairly well at the outset but was time consuming to maintain and didn’t tend to attract too many hits unless explicitly highlighted on the main CJC site. The problem is obviously the fact that the review site was independent of the CJC site. While there is a link to it on the CJC site, it’s more or less ‘buried’ in the announcements and doesn’t seem to get noticed because folks are so lazy that they can’t be bothered to scroll down the list (I’m telling you, there’s no hope for humanity). Anyway, here are a few suggestions:
• Having a number of ‘priority’ books listed in the print version of the journal is, I think, a very good idea. Kudos to the originator of this idea (Marilyn?).
• A separate set of guidelines for reviewers should be made available on the CJC site. It would just be a matter of condensing the regular author’s guidelines in order to exclude such things as ensuring anonymity and the like. I get a lot of questions about this and a truncated, review-specific, set of guidelines would save the future version of me a fair bit of time.
• A list of available books for review could and, methinks, should be placed in a more obvious location on the CJC site. Something like a permanent link on the main page would be great. Maybe a link alongside the ‘subscribe / register / submit’ link bar? A wee icon that could take folks to a separate page listing the books available and, ideally, the condensed set of author’s guidelines would do the job.
• This separate review page should be clear and concise (a simple list should suffice). It should also be editable by the review editor (in order to stay current with what is actually available at any given time).
I’d like to express my thanks to all at the CJC for another successful year. As always, I’d like to thank Kim and Marilyn for all of the usual reasons. I have thoroughly enjoyed my tenure as the review editor for the CJC and hope that I have done a capable job. If it were not for my new (and likely time destroying) duties as Dept. Chair I would be happy to stay on. Please let the incoming review editor know that I am available for whatever advice and assistance they may require.
Statistics for vol. 34, 1-4, 2009
Books Received 48 Books Sent out 36 Reviews Received 26 Reviews rejected: 3 Review Essays: 3
Respectfully, Dale Bradley