scholarly journals The power of peer networking for improving STEM faculty job applications: a successful pilot program

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos M Guardia ◽  
Erin Kane ◽  
Alison G Tebo ◽  
Anna A. W. M. Sanders ◽  
Devrim Kaya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Small Groups ◽  
Psychosocial Support ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Peer Mentors ◽  
Considerable Time ◽  
Faculty Position ◽  
Search Committee ◽  
Peer Reviewing ◽  
Supportive Community ◽  
Academic Search

In order to successfully obtain a faculty position, postdoctoral fellows or postdocs, must submit an application which requires considerable time and effort to produce. These job applications are often reviewed by mentors and colleagues, but rarely are postdocs offered the opportunity to solicit feedback multiple times from reviewers with the same breadth of expertise often found on an academic search committee. To address this gap, this manuscript describes an international peer reviewing program for small groups of postdocs with a broad range of expertise to reciprocally and iteratively provide feedback to each other on their application materials. Over 145 postdocs have participated, often multiple times, over three years. A survey of participants in this program revealed that nearly all participants would recommend participation in such a program to other faculty applicants. Furthermore, this program was more likely to attract participants who struggled to find mentoring and support elsewhere, either because they changed fields or because of their identity as a woman or member of an underrepresented population in STEM. Participation in programs like this one could provide early career academics like postdocs with a diverse and supportive community of peer mentors during the difficult search for a faculty position. Such psychosocial support and encouragement has been shown to prevent attrition of individuals from these populations and programs like this one target the largest leak in the pipeline, that of postdoc to faculty. Implementation of similar peer-reviewing programs by universities or professional scientific societies could provide a valuable mechanism of support and increased chances of success for early-career academics in their search for independence.

scholarly journals Preface

2021 ◽  
Vol 877 (1) ◽  
pp. 011001
Keyword(s):  
Early Career ◽  
Assessment Process ◽  
Initial Assessment ◽  
Great Pleasure ◽  
Double Blind ◽  
Postgraduate Students ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
Peer Reviewing ◽  
International Event ◽  
Successful Event

It is our great pleasure to introduce the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Renewable Energy and Materials Technology (ICOREMT 2021), held at Erbil, Iraq, from the 2nd to the 3rd of August 2021. The core aim of ICOREMT-2021 has always been to bring together early-career researchers, scientists, academics, engineers, and postgraduate students to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of science, technology, and engineering. Accordingly, the professional keynote speakers and researchers have presented various perspectives on research. All submitted papers were have gone through an initial assessment by the editors of ICOREMT-2021 before sending them for reviewers. The latter were carefully selected from many countries to ensure reliable outcomes. The committee of STEPS-2020 followed an accurate and professional double-blind peer-reviewing process that involved 223 reviewers from all over the world. In total, 272 papers were submitted to ICOREMT-2021; 22 were rejected during the initial assessment process, and 56 papers were accepted (acceptance rate of 20.59%). The accepted papers demonstrated novel ideas and impressive effort in engineering science and technology. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to all individuals, authors, editors, reviewers, and committees of ICOREMT-2021 who have contributed to ICOREMT-2021. Without their support, it would not have been possible to make ICOREMT-2021 a successful event in this challenging time. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to our partner, Tikrit University, Iraq. Without their support, it would not have been possible to host such a successful international event. Warmest regards, STEPS Team List of Editors and Scientific Committee are available in this pdf.

scholarly journals Nursing Student Peer Mentorship: The Importance of Professional Relationships

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hlengiwe Seshabela ◽  
Yolanda Havenga ◽  
Hester Cathrina De Swardt
Keyword(s):  
Academic Success ◽  
Nursing Students ◽  
Nursing Student ◽  
Peer Mentoring ◽  
Psychosocial Support ◽  
Professional Relationships ◽  
Peer Mentors ◽  
Professional Relationship ◽  
Undergraduate Nursing ◽  
The Relationship

Nursing students face numerous challenges and stressors related to the dynamics within the academic, psycho-social, and health care environments. Peer mentoring has the potential to support nursing students with these challenges by providing academic and psychosocial support, which may increase retention in the programme and student wellbeing. The focus of this article is on peer mentors’ and mentees’ views of professional relationships as an essential requirement to create and maintain an effective peer mentoring programme. The aim of the study is to support the design and implementation of a peer mentoring programme to enhance students’ academic success in an undergraduate nursing programme. It is thus important to determine students’ views about the relationship that would create a supportive environment for them. A descriptive qualitative research design was used. A purposive sample of 20 participants participated in semi-structured individual interviews and focus groups with peer mentors and mentees in an undergraduate nursing programme. Measures to ensure trustworthiness and ethical research were implemented. The importance of professional relationships as the glue that holds a peer mentoring programme together emerged. In order to establish the professional relationship, participants explained the importance of boundaries in the relationship, commitment toward the programme by all role players, and the qualities required of a mentor. Recommendations were made for training mentors and mentees in establishing and maintaining boundaries, negotiating relationship contracts, and developing the qualities required of mentors.

scholarly journals An analysis of the Canadian cognitive psychology job market (2006-2016)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
Valerie Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Journal Article ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Job Market ◽  
Psychology Programs ◽  
Faculty Position ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Publication Number ◽  
The Cost

How accomplished does one need to be in order to be competitive on the Canadian cognitive psychology job market? We looked at the publication record of everyone who was hired as an Assistant Professor in Canadian cognitive psychology divisions with PhD programs between 2006 and 2016 (N = 64). Individuals who were hired from 2006-2011 averaged 10 journal article publications up to and including the year that they were hired. However, this increased by 57% to 18 publications by 2012-2016. Notably, this increase (a) occurred despite an increase in the number of positions since 2010, (b) was not restricted to top-ranked institutions, (c) did not come at the cost of decreasing quality in research (based on citations), and (d) was not driven by longer postdoctoral fellowships. To supply context, we obtained data on the publication records of 98 eminent and early career award winning cognitive psychologists when they obtained their first faculty position. The correlation between year of hire and publication number in the full sample was strongly positive (r = .47) and driven primarily by a substantial increase in recent years. This suggests that the increasingly competitive job market is not specific to Canada. Finally, we found that behavioural (as opposed to neuroscience) researchers and those who obtained their PhD from Canadian universities may be at particular risk in the job market. At a time when increasing numbers of PhDs are graduating from cognitive psychology programs, it has likely never been more difficult to obtain a faculty position.

Mentorship knows no distance: an online career mentorship programme by Women in Geospatial+

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina H. Szeto ◽  
Julia Wagemann ◽  
Aubin A. Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Professional Growth ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Career Goals ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Career Stages ◽  
Peer Mentors ◽  
Media Campaign ◽  
Peer Mentorship ◽  
Professional Network

<p>Women in Geospatial+ is a professional network that promotes gender-equality in the geospatial industry and academia. In October 2019, Women in Geospatial+ launched an online career mentorship programme that attracted over 180 global applicants. The inaugural cohort featured 42 participants from 17 countries who were matched with mentors, mentees or peer mentors based on their career goals and time zones. </p><p>The programme enabled mentorship between mid-career and early career participants as well as peer mentorship between people with similar career stages. People of all genders were welcome to participate in this year-long programme. As a result, two men participated as mentors. Participants were provided with a mentorship programme guide with resources for a successful mentorship experience. They were also required to discuss goals and expectations as a group and submit an agreement form at the start of the programme. A safe space via a Slack channel was created where women could interact with other women participants in the mentorship programme. In addition, a social media campaign on Twitter and LinkedIn (#MentorshipMonday) also featured programme participants, their work and their achievements in the geospatial field.</p><p>This presentation will feature lessons learned from organising the mentorship programme as well as feedback from participants about how the mentorship programme has impacted their careers and professional growth.</p>

Geoscience Authors and Reviewers during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Demographic Analysis of AGU's Authors and Peer Reviewers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paige Wooden ◽  
Brooks Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Science Research ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Demographic Analysis ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Early Career Researchers ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Peer Reviewing ◽  
Peer Reviewers ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
The Impact

<p>The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work and live, and as of January 2020, the increase in cases and the initiation of the vaccine introduces even more uncertainty into the short-term future. With an increase in domestic responsibilities for many people, there is a heighted concern about the productivity of the Earth and space science research community, and especially the impact on student, early career researchers, and women. AGU's rich data has allowed us to investigate how the pandemic has affected our constituents, and in a poster presented at AGU 2020, we showed that submissions increased in 2020 with the same proportion of women submitting in 2020 and little monthly variation. Submissions from men and women in their 20s decreased in 2020 compared to 2019, while submissions from women in their 30s and 50s and men in their 40s increased.  We saw minor monthly fluctuations in submissions by the country-region of submitting author, with an increase in total and proportional submissions from China continuing from 2019. Additionally, our editors were concerned about the time the most affected scientists could devote to research and peer reviewing. This analysis seeks to update demographics of submitting authors with Q1 2021 data and introduce an analysis of the effect the pandemic had on our article peer reviewers. Preliminary analysis shows very little difference in the invite rates of women in 2020 compared to 2019 (+1%), and only a 0.4% decrease in women's accept to review rates in 2020 compared to 2019. We also only see slight monthly fluctuations in invite and review accept rates. Invitations to review by country of reviewer are proportionally similar in 2020 to those in 2019. This analysis will also investigate any changes in invited and agreed reviewer age to see how the pandemic may have influenced those likely to have research, teaching, and family commitments.</p>

scholarly journals Search results diversification for effective fair ranking in academic search

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham McDonald ◽  
Craig Macdonald ◽  
Iadh Ounis
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Search Results ◽  
Early Career Researchers ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Viable Approach ◽  
Fair Ranking ◽  
Academic Search

AbstractProviding users with relevant search results has been the primary focus of information retrieval research. However, focusing on relevance alone can lead to undesirable side effects. For example, small differences between the relevance scores of documents that are ranked by relevance alone can result in large differences in the exposure that the authors of relevant documents receive, i.e., the likelihood that the documents will be seen by searchers. Therefore, developing fair ranking techniques to try to ensure that search results are not dominated, for example, by certain information sources is of growing interest, to mitigate against such biases. In this work, we argue that generating fair rankings can be cast as a search results diversification problem across a number of assumed fairness groups, where groups can represent the demographics or other characteristics of information sources. In the context of academic search, as in the TREC Fair Ranking Track, which aims to be fair to unknown groups of authors, we evaluate three well-known search results diversification approaches from the literature to generate rankings that are fair to multiple assumed fairness groups, e.g. early-career researchers vs. highly-experienced authors. Our experiments on the 2019 and 2020 TREC datasets show that explicit search results diversification is a viable approach for generating effective rankings that are fair to information sources. In particular, we show that building on xQuAD diversification as a fairness component can result in a significant ($$p<0.05$$ p < 0.05 ) increase (up to  50% in our experiments) in the fairness of exposure that authors from unknown protected groups receive.

scholarly journals Who Is (Likely) Peer-Reviewing Your Papers? A Partial Insight into the World’s Top Reviewers

Publications ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Pomponi ◽  
Bernardino D’Amico ◽  
Tom Rye
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
National Level ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Peer Reviewing ◽  
Scientific Outputs ◽  
Peer Reviewers ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
Insight Into

Scientific publishing is experiencing unprecedented growth in terms of outputs across all fields. Inevitably this creates pressure throughout the system on a number of entities. One key element is represented by peer-reviewers, whose demand increases at an even higher pace than that of publications, since more than one reviewer per paper is needed and not all papers that get reviewed get published. The relatively recent Publons platform allows for unprecedented insight into the usual ‘blindness’ of the peer-review system. At a time where the world’s top peer-reviewers are announced and celebrated, we have taken a step back in order to attempt a partial mapping of their profiles to identify trends and key dimensions of this community of ‘super-reviewers’. This commentary focuses necessarily on a limited sample due to manual processing of data, which needs to be done within a single day for the type of information we seek. In investigating the numbers of performed reviews vs. academic citations, our analysis suggests that most reviews are carried out by relatively inexperienced academics. For some of these early career academics, peer-reviewing seems to be the only activity they engage with, given the high number of reviews performed (e.g., three manuscripts per day) and the lack of outputs (zero academic papers and citations in some cases). Additionally, the world’s top researchers (i.e., highly-cited researchers) are understandably busy with research activities and therefore far less active in peer-reviewing. Lastly, there seems to be an uneven distribution at a national level between scientific outputs (e.g., publications) and reviews performed. Our analysis contributes to the ongoing global discourse on the health of scientific peer-review, and it raises some important questions for further discussion.

Functions of peer mentoring, satisfaction and the “real” relationship in postgraduate psychology education

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly Quinlan ◽  
Trevor Crowe ◽  
Frank P. Deane ◽  
Meredith Whittington
Keyword(s):  
Peer Mentoring ◽  
Psychosocial Support ◽  
Skill Development ◽  
Peer Mentors ◽  
Real Relationship ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Real ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
Helpful Events ◽  
The Relationship

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how a peer mentoring relationship may support provisional psychologists engaged in postgraduate education in Australia. The theoretical lens for this study draws from the real relationship framework and significant events literature. Design/methodology/approach Quantitative and qualitative data were obtained via a web survey from a sample of 23 mentors and 41 mentees. Participants had engaged in a one-year peer mentoring program on a volunteer basis. The survey contained measures of functions of mentoring, perceived genuineness and realism in the relationship, and overall satisfaction with peer mentoring. Participants also provided accounts of helpful events, hindering events and open feedback. Findings Perceived satisfaction was significantly correlated with greater genuineness and realism in the relationship. Satisfaction was associated with psychosocial and clinical functions of mentoring for both mentors and mentees, and career functions for mentees only. Qualitative findings indicated that the most helpful events included psychosocial support, mutual understanding and skill development. The most frequent hindering events were logistics/time, lack of structure and mentor technique/activity. Practical implications Peer mentors show great promise for supporting provisional psychologists. Recommendations for higher education providers include providing peer mentors with guidance regarding the importance of psychosocial support, clinical skill development and creating genuine and real relationships. Peer mentor training would also benefit from the inclusion of career development strategies and psychoeducation on transference. Originality/value This study is the first to apply the real relationship framework and significant events analysis to the psychology peer mentoring context.

scholarly journals Which Are the Tools Available for Scholars? A Review of Assisting Software for Authors during Peer Reviewing Process

Publications ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
J. Israel Martínez-López ◽  
Samantha Barrón-González ◽  
Alejandro Martínez López
Keyword(s):  
Review Process ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Plagiarism Detection ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
New Classification ◽  
Data Archiving ◽  
Peer Reviewing ◽  
Technology And Communication ◽  
Academic Search

There is a large amount of Information Technology and Communication (ITC) tools that surround scholar activity. The prominent place of the peer-review process upon publication has promoted a crowded market of technological tools in several formats. Despite this abundance, many tools are unexploited or underused because they are not known by the academic community. In this study, we explored the availability and characteristics of the assisting tools for the peer-reviewing process. The aim was to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the tools available at this time, and to hint at new trends for further developments. The result of an examination of literature assisted the creation of a novel taxonomy of types of software available in the market. This new classification is divided into nine categories as follows: (I) Identification and social media, (II) Academic search engines, (III) Journal-abstract matchmakers, (IV) Collaborative text editors, (V) Data visualization and analysis tools, (VI) Reference management, (VII) Proofreading and plagiarism detection, (VIII) Data archiving, and (IX) Scientometrics and Altmetrics. Considering these categories and their defining traits, a curated list of 220 software tools was completed using a crowdfunded database (AlternativeTo) to identify relevant programs and ongoing trends and perspectives of tools developed and used by scholars.

Professional association group mentoring for allied health professionals

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalie Coppin ◽  
Greg Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Health Professionals ◽  
Allied Health ◽  
Psychosocial Support ◽  
Professional Association ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Mentoring Program ◽  
Allied Health Professionals ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Group Mentoring ◽  
The Many

Purpose – Mentoring is widely used in the health sector, particularly for early career professionals in the public health system. However, many allied health professionals are employed in private practice and rely on their professional association to provide mentoring support and training. This mentoring context is under-researched. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A purposeful sample of 15 allied health professionals were interviewed using semi-structured interviews that were then analyzed using template analysis. Findings – The many-to-many group mentoring program delivered valuable knowledge, diagnostic skills and networking opportunities but did not provide inclusion, role modeling or psychosocial support to participants. Also identified were structural and operational issues including; the role of the coordinator in addressing contribution reluctance and participant confidence, confidentiality issues, lack of mentor training and overall organization of the program. Practical implications – Group mentoring is a valuable method of delivery for professional associations. The many-to-many group mentoring model is beneficial in a situation where the availability of mentors is limited. Further, the importance of having a dedicated program coordinator and a skilled facilitator is emphasized. Originality/value – This research contributes to the limited literature on many-to-many group mentoring by reviewing the effectiveness of an existing many-to-many group mentoring program for allied health professionals delivered by a professional association.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document