Bringing science into disrepute

There is a growing number of journals and conferences whose sole purpose seems to be to elicit papers and then charge authors for publication. This is not the route to scientific communication and dialogue. Here is today's example, which seems to be sent to anyone they can get an email address for, regardless of the kind of science or quality of work:

Journal of Applied Science and Innovations

Dear Dr Professor Will Hughes

Greetings from Journal of Journal of Applied Science and Innovations 

To celebrate the Vol. 1 Issue 3, it is our pleasure to invite you to contribute an article. Your contribution will help the journal to establish its high standards and get indexed by prestigious indexing services soon.

Short-communications, Review articles, Research articles, Case reports etc. are also accepted.

Note: On this happy occasion, we are here to announce that those who contribute their manuscripts will receive Discount to the articles submitted on or before November 10, 2017.

Submit your article at to this E-mail id.
appliedscience@rroij.com, editor.jasi@peerreviewedjournals.com

Please provide your acceptance to the same.

Look forward for your reply

Best regards,
Cynthia Grace
Journal Coordinator 
Journal of Applied Science and Innovations

Disclaimer
This message is confidential. It may also be privileged or otherwise protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed. If you have received it by mistake, please let us know by e-mail reply and delete it from your system; you may not copy this message or disclose its contents to anyone. The views, opinions, conclusions and other information’s expressed in this electronic mail are not given or endorsed by the company unless otherwise indicated by an authorized representative independent of this message.

There are hallmarks of fake standing here. Claims that the journal has high standards and hints that it might become indexed by as commercial indexing service, as if that were a badge of recognition. It isn't. Many indexing services are indiscriminate. The list of types of communication that indicates they will take anything as long as you pay. You can even get a discount on the charges for publication if you are quick! So, the only things missing from this is any connection to a recognised University, an established publisher, an international editorial board, a web page, even a named editor who is an authority in a particular field.

I sincerely hope that no one is taken in by this cynical practice of milking the academic community for money.

Reviewing research papers

There are several posts in this blog about reviewing research papers, and it is a theme that constantly crops up, both in relation to refereeing a journal paper for an editor of a journal, an in relation to building up the elemental parts of a literature review. As I have said before, these are two distinctive activities.

Many students struggle to make critical evaluations of published papers, and there are many reasons why they might find this difficult at first. One way of approaching the task could be to try to focus on whether a paper is making an interesting and useful contribution to our collective understanding. I think that what we are looking for is signs that author of a paper is clever enough to provide a persuasive case. What I mean by this is to look for evidence in a paper that the author is knowledgeable, has a good understanding of the issues, can put together an argument and can make judgements.

In order to be convinced that an author is knowledgeable, I would look for evidence that he/she knows about the generalities and specifics of the topic. To be convinced that the author has an understanding, I would try to find evidence of different views being weighed in the balance and ideas being applied to examples, especially I would look for the use of metaphors and analogies. In thinking about whether the paper has a strong argument, I would look for the use of logic and the sequence of ideas. The language of argument is interesting, and this is closely related to grammar, vocabulary and logic. I do not find the use of jargon or inflated diction particularly compelling. But plain language in straightforward words is often an element of a good argument. It should be clear. Finally, in looking to see whether an author is making judgements, there should be evidence of discrimination in the kind of sources being relied on to form the foundations for the work, and judgement in the nature of the conclusions as well as the all of the choices about what to include and what to exclude in putting the paper together.

Some common errors frequently reveal weak papers and unclear thinking. Papers typically follow this structure:

• Abstract - summarizing the whole paper including the specific findings
• Introduction - explaining what the paper is about
• Literature review - dealing with what we collectively already know, specifically, but not exclusively, in terms of past research
• Possibly some empirical work - not all papers fit into the category of empirically-based research
• Analysis and/or discussion - empirically-based papers would separate the analysis from the data, then all papers would include discussion of what all this leads us to
• Conclusions - explaining what this all means, perhaps with an outline of the parameters of the research and how that restricts the application of the findings, and usually with suggestions about what certain groups of people might do differently as a result of this research, whether these groups are scholars, practitioners or policy-makers

In weak papers authors often get the sections mixed up, probably because a weak paper will not really lead to any conclusions. Thus, I often find that the conclusions only really summarize the paper, the abstract introduces, rather than summarizes, and the introduction jumps straight into a general literature review before the detailed and focused part of the literature. As a result, in my editorial capacity, I often suggest to authors that they should move the introduction section to the literature review, move the abstract to the introduction, move the conclusions to the abstract, and then try to write some proper conclusions that convey something about what all this means. If they cannot do that, then the work is not really good enough to be called research, I would venture to suggest.

It might be an interesting exercise to see if you can find a paper where the sections are mixed up in this way. It would certainly give new researchers the confidence to take a critical stance when it comes to reviewing papers for their literature review!

Networking on the web

There is a growing number of tools for networking on the web. Facebook is great for social networking, but it can be very distracting and difficult to manage. There are so many facets to it that it is probably inappropriate for direct communication focused on scientific exchanges. Indeed, there is a group in Facebook for construction management researchers. But it may make you despair of the human condition, because it is filled with trivial requests from people who are not researchers asking questions of an entirely random nature and with no sense of who their questions are directed at. It is pretty hopeless and probably needs to be closed down, yet there are more than 500 members on it from all over the world. Most of them just seem desperate to find someone to talk to, or seek a forum for advertising their wares. It fails where other tools succeed.

In our field, probably the most successful tool to date is the Co-operative Network for Building Researchers (CNBR). This has been going for 21 years and has more than 2500 members globally. It is only an email network, but it is really successful and enables some very useful discussions. It also enables unavoidable chit-chat and distractions, but not too much.

There are plenty of other places where we can develop networks, if we wish to. Academia.edu, for example. I have a profile there at http://reading.academia.edu/WillHughes and this enables me to connect with people who share my research interests. There is not the opportunity for chit-chat like there is on CNBR, and it is less intrusive in the daily diet of emails (if you set it it up right). You can upload papers and books, presentations, CVs, all sorts of academic outputs, and by tagging them with keywords, you become visible to like-minded people around the globe. This is a good way of finding new research contacts.

A new service is Mendeley. This looks like an excellent tool. Primarily it is useful for managing bibliographies. But it also enables the setting up of groups, whether for your own research team, for a department, for a global group of people who share similar interests. One really useful thing about this service is that unlike academia.edu, you don’t need to type in your publications from scratch, because it connects to many bibliographical databases and imports the details of papers that you identify as yours. It is quite quick to set up a profile and although I have only been looking at it for a day, it appears to have some really useful functions.

If networking with a mixture of practitioners and academics, I would recommend LinkedIn, because it has quite a good reach and does not involve all the distracting “fun stuff” that you get in facebook. It is a good way to get connected to all sorts of people, but if you are only looking for academic contacts, it is probably not for you.

Finally, if all you want to do is let off steam every so often and have a rant about something, get yourself a BLOG! I have found this to be useful for more than just the occasional rant. I can use it to collect advice and guidance that I give to students and to authors of papers in the journal. Over the months and years, a collection of guidance notes is accumulating here, and it is very easy to point people to short things that I have already written, which saves me from writing them again. I can return to edit old posts, and also place here contributions that I may have developed for other reasons (this post, for example, started out life as a contribution to an email discussion).

There is a lot to be said for using the appropriate tool for the job. It is highly unlikely that we will find one service that fulfils all aspirations. We need different tools for different tasks. Join me in some of these services, and we can explore these things together and see what we can achieve!

Nominating referees

An author asked me if I coud suggest names of referees for him to nominate in the process of submitting a paper to Construction Management and Economics. I replied to him, no need. If I can nominate them I can select them when I am selecting reviewers! The reason for asking authors to nominate is two-fold. First, we may be lucky and get introduced to someone we had not previously come across. Second, it helps to understand better what kind of academic is best for the paper. It is more informative than mere keywords, which are bit uncertain. I don’t want authors to think that we actually use the referees they nominate when we choose reviewers for the paper. It just helps us to think about the kind of person they have directed their paper at. We would use the people they nominate for other papers in the same area. After all, this is a double-blind review process! It is interesting how these processes are interpreted in different ways.

Academics vs practitioners?

In discussing the opportunities for involving practitioners as authors in Construction Management and Economic a friend of mine challenged me because he got the impression that I was wanting to work in isolation from industry in case "they contaminated our minds and data"! I felt that he was misunderstanding my motives. Of course it would be disastrous if academics worked in isolation, I agree 100%. Our research is rightly grounded in the construction sector. It certainly is not the case that I think that practitioners contaminate our minds and data. I agreed 100%. "They" ARE our data! They are the source of the problems that we study, they may sometimes be the source of solutions that we seek to understand and, frequently, they are the very people that we study. No, there is no sense of isolation there.

My point was that our data subjects are not authors. It was to do with ensuring that our message is tailored to suit our audience. If the findings of our research are meaningful for industry, then we must, of course, present them to industry. But in the journal, we are academics talking to academics, in a fairly structured way guided by conventions that may not be appropriate for a wider audience. In the journal, we are focusing on theory-testing and/or theory-building, but not on the dissemination of our results to a wider audience. That is the crucial characteristic of an archival research journal like ours - to record advances in research. Other media already exist for recording and disseminating advances in practice. I think that is right, and it is helpful for everyone to have this distinction.

So, yes, it is precisely because practitioners define our field by their practices that I am interested in their contributions. But not because of their ability to carry out research projects with us. Of course, there are people who have a foot in both camps and I do come across practitioners who have done "proper" research that is reportable in our pages. But then they are generally writing as researchers, not as practitioners. So the boundary is blurred. The acid test for a research paper is simply this question: does it test or develop theory? If the answer is "yes", then we are interested. If it is "no", then we are not.

And, I also acknowledge that although this is the editorial policy now, it may not be the editorial policy forever, and it was not the policy many years ago. Everything is open to challenge and change!

Comparing the values of research outputs

Recently, the CNBR network carried a message announcing a conference in Australia, and one of the recipients sent a rejoinder about how this particular conference was one that was selected as an "A" rated conference for the Australian Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) scheme. This scheme involved ranking all journals and conferences and giving them a rating. It provides an administrative route for Australians to decide whether to appoint/promote academics, based on how many research outputs they have got in the top-rated outlets on the list. It also means that Australian universities would probably not fund their staff to go to conferences that are not A-rated. This is symptomatic of a much wider movement in society, generally, to avoid the need for professional judgement at all levels. Some commentators (e.g. O’Neill, O. A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) have connected this to the decline of trust in society. Of course, although there is a general feeling that trust is in decline, and that we need more of it, it does not necessarily follow that we do indeed need more trust. It is interesting to read Cook, Hardin and Levi (2007) (Cooperation Without Trust?) who argue that there are better things than trust to account for social order.

When I was working on the Professional Futures study, it was clear that there was a growing difficulty in society in terms of making judgements. I think this is getting worse. People are so frightened of making judgements of any kind that they would prefer to have objective lists of publications, rather than actually look at things and figure out whether they are any good. This prompted me to respond to the list as follows:

I think it flags up the lunacy of the whole process of ranking conferences and journals in this way. Are we to suppose that just because a paper has been published in an A*-rated journal or A-rated conference that it is definitely better than a paper in a B-rated forum? And are we to suppose that anything that was published outside of these A-list things is somehow sub-standard?

I sincerely hope that most of us are clever enough not to accept administrative views of what constitutes quality when it comes to research outputs! I would hope that academics have an eye on their peer groups, and on their own careers beyond their current employer, even if we are told where to publish. What senses do we lack that we cannot detect good conferences, journals and papers for ourselves?

Various colleagues responded privately to me, agreeing and offering observations about how the list was compiled in a very narrow and parochial way. One colleague from the Netherlands observed that although she agreed wholeheartedly with my views, if you find yourself in this situation, there is no much that you can do. And my rejoinder was:

It places you in a difficult position, for sure. If it is not your peers who are deciding which are your most important outputs, what chance have you got?

I think that in such a situation, it may be helpful to acknowledge that there are two different games to be played, and they are somewhat incompatible, but not wholly. First, our bosses want us to perform in a strictly quantifiable way that requires numbers of papers in certain places. Second, we need for our own careers to figure out a publication strategy that places our work where it reaches the peer group we seek to access. Admittedly, these two activities overlap, hopefully by a lot. But we have to acknowledge that sometimes it is necessary to publish outside the manufactured lists. In the long run, it is important that academics keep an independent sense of what their field looks like. Also, I would expect that this whole discussion may look different in other fields.

So, I agree that it is not possible to ignore the lists when you are subjected to that kind of regime. But I also think that we have to keep a sense of perspective, and ensure that our publications help each of us to develop an appropriate publication profile that can be appreciated by our peers not just for quantity, but for quality of the research. And that requires subjective, professional judgement.

It is worrying when intelligent people like academics collude in the erosion of their own judgement.

How to get a PhD! Essential reading

Many PhD students are challenged by a familiar set of problems and issues, which are familiar to experienced supervisors and have been written about extensively. If you are thinking about doing a PhD, or you are engaged in one, I strongly recommend these books:

• Becker, H.S. (1998 Tricks of the trade: how to think about your research while you're doing it. Chicago: University of SChicago Press.
• Creswell, R (2013) Research design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 4ed. London: Sage. ISBN 9781452274614.
• Petre, M and Rugg, G (2010) The unwritten rules of PhD research (2nd ed). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-21344-8
• Phillips, E.M. and D.S. Pugh (2010) How to get a PhD. 5th ed. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. ISBN 978-0335242023
• White, B (2011) Mapping your thesis: the comprehensive manual of theory and techniques for masters and doctoral research. Camberwell, Victoria: Australian Council Educational Research. ISBN 978-0-86431-823-7

Rhythmic ripples

As part of a two-day research meeting, we took part in a workshop. It involved everyone, each in a solitary way. We each had to pour ourselves a glass of water, but not the glasses that most of us were already drinking from. Smaller tumblers were issued. We were asked not to drink the water straight away, but to "experience" the glass of water... like a meditation. We had to spend five minutes experiencing the glass of water. So I suspended my disbelief and cynicism, and reached out my hand to grasp my glass gently, without picking it up. I could see rhythmic ripples on the surface, very small, some of which may have been my pulse. Interlaced with this was another rhythm, perhaps caused by my neighbour tapping his foot. Bigger, less rhythmic ripples occurred from time to time as another neighbour adjusted his position. I saw the ceiling lights reflected on the surface, and refracted below the surface, reflecting off the inside of the glass. There were 28 different points of light, in groups of two or three, on the surface. Below the surface there were 58. Then the five minutes were up and I'd not yet taken a sip. Too slow, me.

The next part of the workshop involved running your tongue over all of your teeth, inside and out, all surfaces of the teeth that could be reached with the tongue. I cannot now recall how long that went on for. We were given a piece of A4 drawing paper and a pencil. Then we had to close our eyes, put the pencil on the paper, and envision our mouths. We then signed consent forms for our drawings to be used as part of a research project on art in healthcare. That was our workshop experience. Puzzling, eh?

Multiple journal submissions

It is interesting how much there is to learn about publishing that appears not to be passed on by PhD supervisors to their students. Today I dealt with a problem author whose paper to Construction Management and Economics was not only 70% longer that the maximum we allow, but was also, as it turned out, very similar to another paper by the same author that I had dealt with only the day before. The similarities were obvious when I looked at them so close together, but it turned out that he had submitted three papers over a month or so, all drawing from his PhD, all far too long, and only differing in terms of the focus of the cases being presented in each paper. Each repeated the same mistakes as the other (not taking a critical stance in reviewing the literature and lacking in a certain punchiness to the conclusions).

When I challenged the author about cranking out so many papers from the same PhD, he pointed out that he had a further six papers in various states of progress, all reaching the same conclusion, but based on different case studies. I pointed out that this was not good academic practice and that we only wanted one paper that fell within our word limits. The author was very attentive to what I was saying, and it was clear that this was all new to him, having only recently completed his PhD. He suggested, respectfully, that maybe the published Instructions for Authors should make this point clear.

The problem with that suggestion is that the Instructions for Authors (IfA) are not meant to form general advisory page about the protocols of academic publishing, a topic about which much has been written in the past. Rather, the IfA are intended to highlight journal-specific matters. Moreover, we tend to see advice about general academic conduct as a primary responsibility of PhD supervisors, who usually make sure that they enlighten their PhD students about a much wider range of issues than multiple submissions. I have tried to make the general principles of authorship clear in publications of my own, in the past, for example:

Hughes, W.P. (2008) Getting your research published in refereed journals. In: Knight, A. and Ruddock, L. (eds). Advanced Research Methods in the Built Environment. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 193-206. ISBN: 9781405161107.


But of course, I am not the only person who writes such papers, and it is quite important for new academics to learn about a whole range of issues relating to developing a career as a professional academic. And finely slicing a piece of research into a disproportionately large number of papers is only one of many pitfalls for the budding academic.

To withdraw or not to withdraw?

A colleague from another University asked me a question: he submitted a paper to an international journal and had received no response after 10 months. He tried to contact the editor and his secretary said that the review process has started but they have not received all the responses from reviewers. Did I think it is OK for him to write a formal letter to withdraw the paper now? Or should he wait until the decision is made, no matter how long it takes? I was quick to advise him as follows.

In my experience, the gathering of referee reports is a burdensome task for an editor and the editorial office. One of the reasons that it can take so many months to get reports is that referees often do not answer promptly, or they say they will carry out the task, then change their minds, or they are just slow because of all the other demands on their time. Often, over a period of many months, we might find that we have tried 20 different referees in order to end up with the requisite four reports.

After all this work it is very annoying to then discover that the author wants to withdraw the paper! However, if the paper is rejected, then there is no real problem. Alternatively, if the decision is Major, or Reject & Resubmit, then that is an opportunity for the author to say to the editor that the requirements are just too harsh, and that he or she would prefer to withdraw it. But if an editor calls for minor revisions, or simply accepts the paper, the author really should not withdraw it. It would be bad protocol, because the editorial office and the referees wouyld have been working through this process for no reason. Perhaps the question to ask is, why would an author want to withdraw a paper mid-way through a long refereeing process? I have come across situations where an author has realized, too late, that there are such significant flaws in the paper that it really should go no further. This would need some careful dialogue wit the editor, explaining why the paper cannot continue in the process.

I summed up my advice thus. Therefore, you need pretty strong reasons for withdrawal. Either the editor's requirements are too harsh, or you have discovered some aspect of the paper that renders it unpublishable. I don't think that you should withdraw for any other reason, unless you want to upset the editor!

House of Commons

It was quite a kick jumping into a taxi and requesting "House of Commons, please". But the traffic around Westminster slowed to a useless crawl, so I walked the last part. The occasion was the launch of a report, wittily titled, "Never waste a good crisis".

After a couple of glasses of wine and a few nibbles, Nick Raynsford was introduced to us. A very good speaker, of course, being an MP. Good eye contact, engaging, and clear points. He drew our attention to one graph in the report and told us how the best construction projects had done really well, but the rest had a long way to go. He shared with us his vision for an improved industry focused on value, and congratulated Andrew Wolstenhulme and his team on a great piece of work. Andrew then gave us an overview and, like a true gentleman, diverted the spotlight to the team rather than himself. One strange point that he made was that for every pound spent on deign, ten are spent on building, a hundred on operating and the benefit is a thousand. Yes, I know, almost impossible to figure out what it can mean, but the last incarnation of this kind of ratio was 1:5:200, a ratio that claimed that for every pound of building there are five of maintenance and 200 of operating. Clearly nonsense, otherwise construction would be half a percent of GDP. We debunked that myth in a conference paper (click here if you want to read it). I was happy with the idea of construction being pitched at roughly 10% of GDP and design being roughly 10% of construction. These are near enough in terms of orders of magnitude. But I had no idea how we could get £1,000 of "benefit" from £10 of construction. All very bizarre, but worryingly typical in this kind of gathering.

Then Vaughan Burnand, Chairman of CE enjoined us to keep the faith and continue to believe in the change agenda. By this time I was wondering if I'd stumbled into some strange kind of church gathering.

I had been involved in one of the multidisciplinary workshops that were part of the background work for this report, I was interested in meeting those participants again, and in seeing what the team had made of our input. Of course, few from our group had made it. And it was hard to recognise our words in the report. Shortly after our workshop, I received a draft nine-page summary of all we'd said, and I remember being satisfied that most of what we'd said had been captured. Perhaps it was not sufficiently "on-message" to have made it into the final report. Or, more likely, perhaps there was just too much of it! The section on industry structure in the report picks up a few of the main points and makes good use of them, so I am pleased with the impact of this. The report is available for download here. It was good to meet up with so many friends and colleagues from the industry, and catch up, and it was particularly good to see reports aobut how we organize ourselves being launched in the House of Commons. Have a look at the report, and post your comments here - it would be interesting to see what others make of it.

Political leaders from construction professions

In the Co-operative Network for Building Researchers, an international e-mail list of people in the same field as me, a question was raised by Leonhard Bernold: "...our profession lacks direct connections into the political sphere, despite our crucial roles everywhere you look. How many politicians are there in the country you live with an engineering education?"

That got me thinking, and I started to make a list, to which others then added, so (probably a pointless exercise) this is a place where I can maintain and edit a list of construction professionals who achieved political influence:

• Boris Yeltsin, became president of Russia


• Osama bin Laden is sometimes said to be have qualified as a civil engineer, but it is not too clear


• Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), Palestinian Leader


• Heberto Castillo Martinez, 68, Leftist Political Leader in Mexico


• Ismail Abu Shanab: prominent leader, co-founder of Hamas


• Hundreds of engineers and architects are challenging the official 9/11 Commission Report


• Herbert Macaulay (1864-1945) was a Nigerian political leader. One of the first leaders of the Nigerian opposition to British colonial rule, he was also a civil engineer, journalist, and accomplished musician.


• Mohamed Ahmad Mahgoub, Sudanese political leader, very interesting life. A poet, a lawyer, and a very active politician at the centre of the Suez crisis in 1956.


• Robert Stephenson (1803-1859) Conservative Member of Parliament for Whitby 1847-59


• Lee Myung-bak (b1941) President of South Korea since 2008. Although he ran Hyundai Construction, his University education was Business Administration, so maybe this does not count.


• Ernest Marples, UK Minister of Transport


• Sir Keith Joseph, Director of Bovis, UK Member of Parliament 1956-87, Secretary of State for Social Services 1970-4, Secretary of State for Industry 1979-81, Secretary of State for Education and Science 1981-6.


• Paul Channon, UK Member of Parliament 1959-97,Minister for the Arts 1981-3, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1986–7, Secretary of State for Transport 1987–9.


• Nick Ridley (1929-93), UK Member of Parliament 1959-92, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1981–3, Secretary of State for Transport 1983–6, Secretary of State for the Environment 1986–9, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1989–90.


• John Gilbert (b1927), UK Member of Parliament 1970-97, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1974-5, Minister for Transport 1975-6, Minister of State for Defence 1976-9


• Nasir El Rufai (b.1960) Director General of The Bureau of Public Enterprises, and former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja from 16 July 2003 to 29 May 2007. Member of the ruling People's Democratic Party.


• President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran - A civil engineer with a PhD in civil engineering and traffic transportation planning. Also a lecturer and member of faculty at Iran University of Science and Technology.

We could go on and on with this, but I think the point is made that there are senior politicians all over the place who are engineers! What I don't understand is why people jump to conclusions like this without attempting to find out the truth of the matter first.

HaCIRIC Conference

The second annual conference of HaCIRIC (Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre) took place in Brighton these last two days. It was in the Brighton Metropole Hotel, on the seafront, although the location could have been anywhere, because, typically, none of the rooms we used had any windows, and the decor was standard 1980s stuff, which could have been anywhere in the world. But when we ate, we had great views of the sea. The presentations at the conference were very good indeed, ranging from strategic health planning through to the way that stroke patients were dealt with in UK compared with USA. It was really useful being able to connect the way that health services are planned with the funding, design and construction of the facilities themselves. As before, many of us found ourselves questioning why the health service needs capital assets, and struggling with the tensions between the needs for operational efficiency on the one hand, and the iconic value a hospital has for the community in which it is based. It seems that local politics demands that every community can identify itself with a hospital of some kind. National politics demands that vote-catching policies are more important than evidence-based health care. And no one wants to pay for health care, apparently. It certainly brought home to me the difficulty of developing a rational and effective health service. Within this complex and difficult context, the HaCIRIC researchers are trying to develop understanding,and provide tools and techniques that will help to resolve some of the inherent difficulties in the provision of the built environment for health care. The conference brought together people from all aspects of the health service, and provided some enlightening and informative moments for all of us.

British Standard on Construction Procurement

Today we had another meeting in London of a BSI Committee which is developing a new standard for construction procurement. The group is organized by Construction Excellence and has met quite a few times since the work started last year. After several meetings, we are now all familiar with each others' foibles and it is very easy to work together. There is representation from across the industry, although with an industry so diverse and complex, no group like this can ever be fully representative. But with a group of experienced people, we are touching a lot of diverse concerns about how to go about the process of construction procurement. Interestingly, this is taking place at the same time as the International Standards Organization is drafting an eight volume standard on construction procurement. The first part of the ISO is currently in draft form and out for consultation until end of April, so when I got back to my office I notified a few thousand people in our field about this, through a couple of mailing lists. I am hoping that this will generate some discussion and feedback, but there is a niggling doubt in my mind that a lot of people will not prioritise this or, perhaps, even see the point of commenting. I am keen to get as many people to comment on this Draft International Standard as I can, so if you have in interest in construction procurement, contact me and I can let you know how to get hold of the draft and comment on it.

Multiple authorship

New Scientist, in its Feedback column of 18 July 1998, wondered how may scientists it takes to write a research paper. Their readers discovered some remarkable papers. One with 562 authors in Physics Letters B (vol 231, p 539). Then another with 596 authors in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research (vol 289, p 35). 718 authors were found on one paper in The Canadian Journal of Cardiology (vol 12, p 127). But the clear winner appears to be something identified by the judges of the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for literature. They deemed E. Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong and their 972 coauthors (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 329, p 673) worthy of the award for their achievement in "publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages". Can that record be beaten?

They also thought about which paper cited the largest number of institutions. One reader found 143 institutions listed in a single paper in The Lancet (vol 342, p 821).

And we thought multiple authorship was getting excessive!

Annotated bibliographies

All research involves starting with what is known on a topic and building on it. All research projects need some basic work to enable the researchers to produce something that is developmental and useful. Comprehensive literature searchers are important, but probably quite rare, especially in our field. Here is a process that ought to be followed, and that research supervisors and funders should encourage and support:

1. Discovery – find out what has been published based on a shortlist of keywords agreed among the members of the research team, or between student and supervisor.
2. Retrieval – acquire the documents, preferably electronically, so that they can be placed in a closed repository for the research team.
   
3. Evaluation – for each document, ascertain whether it is relevant, perhaps revising the list of search terms as a result, and develop definitions of terms for a glossary of concepts that cites publications where specific definitions are used, given or implied.
4. Classification – for each document decide what this is about in relation to the emerging glossary of concepts (terms) and also in terms of whether it appears to the result of research, experience or personal opinion.
5. Description – for each document, provide a few sentences that summarize its relevance to the project

There are two outputs from this process. First, a list of key concepts, with associated keywords for searching on, with each concept defined by reference to the literature, including the full range of referenced definitions for concepts that are contentious, and definitive definitions for those where there is consensus. Second, an annotated bibliography, probably in bibliographic software such as EndNote, which will provide the research team with the basis on which they can critically evaluate the quality of past research and write up a strong literature review. Both the Glossary of Concepts and the Annotated Bibliography can form appendices of any published research report.

Pig-headed scientists

"Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they have specialized, are just as ordinary, pig-headed and unreasonable as anybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous..."

Eysenck, H.J. (1957) Sense and nonsense in psychology. Penguin.

A sense of purpose

Our vision for the School of Construction Management and Engineering (SCME) is to grow the strong multi-disciplinary research base underpinning aspects of construction management in which we have developed an internationally-leading reputation. The vocational disciplines around which our work is focused are not usually the focus of research funding in their own right and, therefore, on the face of it, our research and our teaching seem to be in different areas. That difference is more one of perception than reality. The professional institutions are acutely aware of the need for the professions to develop their respective bodies of knowledge. This extends beyond understanding what passes for best professional practice, to understanding the underlying sciences that can explain and challenge professional practice. In other words, the view in SCME is that the construction professions are not academic disciplines in their own right, but fields of application of theoretical frameworks and empirical research methods drawing widely from management, organization, law, economics, engineering, mathematical modelling, and so on. This is why we appoint academics who are specialists in diverse academic areas, with experience of the complexities of the construction sector. Each academic discipline brings a unique insight into the built environment, and the sector is strengthened as a result. It is this approach that makes SCME a world-class leader of the field. We want to continue to bring diverse academic disciplines to bear on the problems confronting the construction sector so that we can develop new ways of working, new approaches to complex problems, based upon robust and rigorous academic research that not only informs that practical world of construction internationally, but also contributes to the theory-building that helps the mainstream academic disciplines to deal with the complexities of the built environment. We seek to develop the professions in the UK and internationally by providing fundamental insights based on rigorous multi-disciplinary research.