I was recently asked to review a paper submitted to a KM journal. The paper reported a relevant study of KM application in practice, but lacked the expected rigour in reporting the study. I praised its relevance and suggested revision to address rigour. However, the manuscript was rejected.
What do you think is the right balance between relevance and rigour, either as an author or a reviewer?
This is a point that I am always in doubt, but the results should be more important than the care in formatting and reporting the study. However, most reviewers seem to be interested in having a study follow a formal structure and less interested in the relevance of the research. I am in favor of favoring the results.
Vladimir,
it is good to know that you agree with me.
Thank you for your response,
Meliha
I disagree. I think that unless the study is rigorously performed, the results are largely meaningless (or difficult to interpret). The whole point of rigour is to exclude unwanted influences and isolate the one (or more) variables that you are hypothesizing is crucial. The only exception to this that I can think of is when a study is a demonstration of concept design, where the purpose is to describe the process, and the outcome thereof is secondary or unimportant.
Unfortunately, there are way too many slack studies in the literature which are like silt in water - they obscure visibility of the really important things. I feels mean as a reviewer to reject papers, but with supportive feedback you can help the researchers to improve their work, hopefully, if they take your comments on board.
A final point is that most journals have more papers submitted than they can accept, so some are going to be rejected - obviously - but the very highest impact journals have (or should have) also very high standards of rigour. This is not always the case.
Hi Richard,
thank you for your response.
I agree that any methodology used for research must be sound. However, I have never reviewed a paper that used flawed methodology. Typically, authors do not describe their research process properly or with sufficient details. This is particularly evident in action research and case studies. That is what I consider as lacking in rigour. Given that such issues are fixable, I believe that authors should be given a chance to revise rather than reject.
Meliha
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