Just another node…

Our academic community is a social network. Haggett and Chorley (1970) would have argued that it decomposes into a hierarchy, but Mark Gahegan tells me that social networks are not true hierarchies: they are multiply-connected and thus graphs. Some have suggested that social networks are hierarchies of graphs. In an upcoming paper, Mark shows some examples based on IJGIS author, keywords, and institution data. The topologies are based on geographic location, ideas and author connectedness. These provide an interesting way of looking at our activities. One can argue that the role of a university is to be one of these geographic locations at which a member of each disciplinary network can reside, connecting the students and other scholars at that location to the wider group. But each of us also exists in an aspatial network of ideas and connections with like-minded colleagues. It is the role of conferences and peer-reviewed journals to facilitate those external connections. Milgram’s (1967) view is that the importance of a node to the functioning of a social network lies in the number of connections it makes. The importance of these connections is in linking parts of the network together. Usually, this means linking the less well connected parts of the structure to the better connected parts. Increasingly, our university employers are keen to evaluate us on our status within the discipline. Sadly, status and connectedness are seen as being equivalent by those who wish to evaluate us. We are being assessed according to our utility as nodes in the network. Therefore, in our community, there is a considerable importance attached to presenting papers at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals, both of which can help build our connectedness. The fun of exchanging ideas is now accompanied by an imperative for status recognition. Having been the regional editor for the Asia-Pacific for a number of years, I am now much more aware of the fallacy that publication alone is important in building and maintaining connections within the network. Connections need to be bidirectional. Someone else needs to find the paper interesting enough to refer to it, or to build on it to the next stage. It is one of the most difficult jobs negotiating between reviewers and authors when the former point out, not always politely, that the latter’s work falls short on those criteria. It is hard, as an editor, not to share some of the authors’ pain. Yet this is precisely the role of reviewers. For an editor to determine, without advice, what to publish and what not to publish, would be very dangerous. The social network that is our discipline is very dynamic, and sometimes unpredictable. The dead hand of a dictatorial editor would dampen, if not kill, that dynamism and eliminate the unpredictability. Reviewers are very important. Therefore, having partially downgraded the role of editor above, what is left for them to do? Well, selecting appropriate reviewers is a major role and, I suspect, a skill. Some of my more heartening pieces of correspondence run along the lines, ‘I’ve seen this paper five times before, and each time I’ve made recommendation for improvement – but all the authors seem to do is send it to a different journal.’ That means that we got the right reviewer for the paper, or at least made the same judgement as four other editors. It also highlights the problem that many authors International Journal of Geographical Information Science Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2008, 1–3