Castles and Coprolites

I recently completed my last ever volume of the Archaeological Journal as editor, Volume 179 for 2022. When I first took on this role around 5 years ago I had grand plans to blog frequently about the editorial process and provide hopefully useful reflections on papers etc, but that went totally out the window as my job and family life became ever busier, and the editorial work itself took up a substantial amount of time (more perhaps than I realised when I took it on!). Overall I have really enjoyed the experience, and working with the Royal Archaeological Institute more broadly, but there have been  moments when it has been rather stressful. There is a long standing joke amongst academics about the dreaded 'reviewer 2', but perhaps less well known is the 'disgruntled author' who does not agree with the editor's decision! I am lucky that this has never happened often, and in most cases it is a curt email following a reject and resubmit recommendation, but it can b...

I have been meaning to write something about my new role as editor for the Archaeological Journal . I took over from Prof. Howard Williams officially in March, and it has been pretty full on since then. I am pleased to announce that my first issue is now available online ahead of print (vol 175 for 2018), with a great mix of papers spanning the Neolithic to post-Roman and historic periods, and topics ranging from social zooarchaeology to mortuary houses. The major change I made when taking over was moving to an online submission system , rather than dealing with papers manually via email. I personally find this a much easier system, as an author and an editor, and it makes the whole process much quicker. On the whole it seems to have worked well with the majority of authors submitting papers, and reviewers submitting comments within a reasonable time frame. I have still had one or two authors having problems (either technical or in principle!) with the online system. But it makes li...

Since joining Newcastle I have been on two shortlisting panels, one for a temporary teaching post and the other for a permanent lectureship. Having been on the other side of things for such a long time , I think I have honed my own application skills considerably, and it has been quite eye-opening to see how the hiring process works, and what other peoples' applications look like. It was really obvious the people who 'knew what they were doing' (i.e. had probably talked to senior colleagues and gotten advice) versus those who just wrote what I would consider a 'first draft' type application. The application is like a piece of work for publication; everything needs to be spot on. It was frustrating to see what were probably good candidates not really sell themselves well, and often not demonstrate how they actually fit the job criteria. There was a tendency I think in many cases to make assumptions, that the reader would just know what the technical skills were, or w...

No tweets! Having already written about 2000 words on the AEA conference, I thought I'd save these last few thoughts for a separate post, as it feeds into something I've been thinking about in general. It's a bit late considering the conference was back in November 2015 , but better late than never and all that. The AEA is the first conference I've been to that had a social media guidelines, in the form on Tweet/No Tweet symbols. I wish I had actually taken note of the use of the symbol, though qualitatively I think most people were ok with it. Someone made the observation that it was mostly early career researchers that were using the No tweet. This may seem surprising at first, as us 'early career' people are supposed to be all over this social media thing, right? I've seen some discussions on Twitter that really don't see the problem with sharing someone else's work in a public forum; science should be open, and open means sharing. I think th...

Exciting news, a new open access journal has been launched, specifically for archaeological science: Science and Technology of Archaeological Research (STAR) by Maney . This is in addition to the recently launched Open Quaternary by Ubiquity Press. Joining Twitter was one of the best things I've done for my research. It has opened my eyes to a whole online network of research in my own and related areas, and has made me increasingly aware of the importance of open access research. That is, research that is freely available, rather than locked behind a pay wall. I am still unsure how this 'new' direction of publishing will impact the development of my career. As an early career researcher, I am all too aware of the need to publish in the big name (subscription) journals to get research (and job applications!) noticed by the wider community. I am hopefully taking a step in the right direction by making sure that there are open access versions of my papers available online...

Following my post a couple of days ago I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and thought I would get some other opinions to add to my own. I had a chat with some senior academics I have worked with who have been involved in the hiring process of postdocs and academic staff, 1 from a science-heavy background, 1 who is a straight archaeology/regional specialist and 1 who is a bit of both. I asked a series of questions regarding publications, and the answers were pretty interesting. Largely they reflected my own perceptions, but there were a few noteworthy points that I hadn't considered. 1. What do you look for in terms of a candidate's publication record? As we know, peer reviewed journals are important, followed by books in the sciences, with the quality of the book publisher being important. Being an editor of conference proceedings was also noteworthy, but the quality of the papers mattered, and also where it was published. However the overall message was that go...

Advice for Owain? RT @OwainConnors : Anyone got any advice on what to do with my thesis once my corrections are signed off? #PhD #archaeology — Archaeology Postdocs (@archpostdocs) February 20, 2014 I am writing this post in response to this request on Twitter about how to go about publishing an archaeology PhD. As I am now fairly experienced in this area, I felt it would be a good idea to share my knowledge. Please do comment if you have different experiences! How to publish is something that I was never explicitly told about during my PhD, though in hindsight it’s this kind of information that would have been incredibly useful. I think sometimes the more senior we get into the academic hierarchy we can forget that the things that seem so obvious do not come naturally (at least, not without a lot of unnecessarily wasted time and potentially mistakes). So here is my quick guide to publishing a PhD. I will do more on this in a future post as there is a lot to cover. T...