Australian Inflections

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5695891
AutoresIain Hay (0000-0001-6305-061X, Flinders University, autor correspondente)
Ano2014
Volume52
Fascículo4
Páginas349-350
Data de publicação2014-11-01
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoGeographical Research (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1745-5863 • E-ISSN: 1745-5871
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1745-5871.12085
OpenAlexW4235429313
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas7

Early this year, Professor Phil O'Neill and Associate Professor Clive Forster stepped down from the editorial roles with Geographical Research. Although I have acknowledged their work elsewhere, I have been slow to commend them in this forum for their stellar work with the journal. Under Phil's leadership as Editor-in-Chief, and with Clive's involvement, the journal had some great successes. Three come to mind immediately. The first was the tremendous 50th anniversary edition. This featured excellent papers from Australian geographers and reflected the strength, depth, and diversity of the discipline through outstanding work on topics as diverse as the concept of place (Walmsley, 2012); landscape resilience (Turton, 2012); justice and injustice in the city (Fincher and Iveson, 2012); and Australian contributions to GIS (Lees, 2012). The second was the innovative and very successful multimedia extravaganza that surrounded the special issue (vol. 49, no. 3, 2011) on ‘the Australian population debate’. This issue included well-received papers by, among others, Hugo (2011), Kirkpatrick (2011), and Fincher (2011). The third has been maintenance of a very strong, constructive relationship with the journal's publisher, Wiley Blackwell. As Editor-in-Chief, Phil O'Neill was – and remains – a strong ambassador for the journal, and I thank him for all of the wonderful work he inspired, led, and managed. On a more personal note, I would like to express my appreciation to him for taking the time over late summer to help me understand some of the intricacies of the journal and its ‘back office’ activities. I would also like to point out the journal's new Editorial Board and acknowledge the work of the previous Boards. Until now, the journal has had an Australian Editorial Advisory Board and a separate International Editorial Advisory Panel. Both had been in place for a long time. The dual structure demanded reform and, after many years of service, the membership needed refreshing. The new Editorial Board has been streamlined. It comprises a dynamic balance of scholars from different career stages and a range of specialty areas reflecting the discipline's character and the journal's breadth of interests (see Table 1). In approaching new Board members, the editorial team was keen to ensure that all have some personal, professional, or scholarly connections to Australia. We sought a Board that could offer Australian inflections to international connectivity. The new Board also recognises an explicit strategic position we are moving towards with the journal, and that is: that Geographical Research is an international journal by virtue of its encouragement of dialogue between our region (Australia and its environs) and the rest of the world. Although we do hope to sustain international coverage and authorship, Geographical Research will not be an international journal because it carries papers about many different parts of the world, by scholars from around the planet, or because it has an Editorial Board with representatives from ostensibly ‘leading universities’ on each continent. Instead, Geographical Research will more firmly secure its international status by continuing to be the leading venue for Australian geography's conversation with the rest of the world. Ideally, this conversation should be a dialogue, rather than a comparatively unidirectional flow of knowledge fuelled by Australian geographers deferring to Anglo-American works produced in so-called ‘international’ journals, as well as by Anglo-American geographers paying little heed to work based in the Antipodes. It is all very well to point to this direction, but how is it to be achieved? How is Geographical Research to be better recognised as a key nexus for international conversations? Well, in a somewhat paradoxical way, to be better recognised internationally, we need to be even more heavily cited. And to be cited, we must recognise one another's work. After just a short period as Editor-in-Chief, I have already observed the tendency of contributors to cite works published in a small range of journals – other than Geographical Research! You can probably name them as easily as I: Annals, Transactions, PiHG, E&PA. ... There is usually little doubt about the relevance of these citations – although I am sometimes entertained by the apparent tendency to cite some authors in the hope of basking in their reflected glory (an unfortunate practice encouraged in some ‘how-to’ scholarly publications (Murray, 2003, 107)) – but the disturbing adjunct to this is the relative absence of citations by contributors to appropriate papers published in Geographical Research. On some occasions, referees identify such shortcomings, and as Editor-in-Chief I can see it, too, but there is a limit imposed by apparent self-interest on the extent to which the editors can exhort individual authors to cite specific works published in Geographical Research. So, rather than make this appeal to contributors individually, I make that call in general terms here. Cite your colleagues! Not only might this very small action on your part endear you to those colleagues, but it brings the broader long-term prospect of raising the profile of your own work by raising the profile of the journal! It will give greater voice to Australian geography and therefore support our region's engagement in international scholarly dialogue. Recently, we have been given a tremendous fillip in this direction. We received the wonderful news that Geographical Research's Impact Factor (IF) has increased to 1.206 from its previous figure of 0.783. Moreover, the journal's ranking in the Geography subject category is 31/76, also an excellent increase on last year's 41/72. This new IF and discipline grading give us a great deal of the momentum we need to advance the interests set out above. Notwithstanding the unfortunate and misguided 2010 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) journal ranking exercise, the past few years have been very good for Geographical Research. I hope that collectively we can increase the momentum so admirably developed by Phil O'Neill, Clive Forster, and the rest of the editorial team

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