CTER v30n3 - Editor's Note

Editor’s Note

Steven R. Aragon
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Welcome to Volume 30 Number 3. You are probably asking yourself, “shouldn’t I be receiving Volume 31 Number 3 instead?”. That is a legitimate question to be asking. My staff and I should be in the process of finalizing 31(3) but that is not the case.

Early in 2005, I got an email from a colleague congratulating me on becoming the Editor of the new Career and Technical Education Research . After saying “congratulations,” this individual stated “I guess” in parentheses. When I read that, I wondered what was meant by that statement. I think I’ve figured it out.

I want to begin by saying that I am quite proud of the manuscripts that have been published in the three issues of Volume 30. I feel they are quality articles and have furthered our understanding of the field of career and technical education across different contexts. These articles have also increased our understanding of career and technical education as it works in international and diverse settings. More importantly, I think each of the manuscripts that have appeared in Volume 30 represent the high standards of the journal and help it to retain its reputation as a top research journal. However, getting to this point has not been easy.

I want to thank all of the reviewers who dedicate their time to evaluate manuscripts for Volume 30. As we all know, this is a time consuming task and manuscripts requiring several reviews make the process even more time consuming. I have had individuals that have reviewed a large number of manuscripts simply because our reviewer pool has been shrinking. In these cases, I have had to give them an additional four weeks to complete a review so they would not burn out which obviously slows down the process. Unfortunately, I have had some good senior scholars of the field ask to be removed from the reviewer list simply because they were tired of receiving so many papers that did not meet basic research standards. Other reviewers have joked with me by saying they felt they should have their name on a manuscript because of the significant amount of feedback provided to the author. I too have had to step in as a reviewer when others would decline and the CTER staff could not find a replacement.

I think we all have a role in ensuring the timely publication of the journal and the highest quality level of manuscripts possible. I thought about some of the challenges the CTER staff has faced this year and would like to offer some thoughts.

I would like to encourage students and new assistant professors to have their manuscripts reviewed by a senior faculty member prior to submission. The major reason manuscripts submitted by students and new assistant professors have been rejected over the past couple of years is because the manuscript lacks a theoretical framework. It is critical that all manuscripts articulate a solid foundation upon which the study was built. I have been mentoring a new assistant professor this past year who has also received feedback from reviewers stating his theoretical framework was weak. This is something I have been able to help him with in his writing during this past year.

CTER welcomes manuscripts from scholars in international countries. However, many of these manuscripts have also been rejected during this past year. My observation has been that these manuscripts fail to meet the publication requirements of the American Psychological Association (APA) which is the style and format guide for CTER . If you are an international scholar interested in submitting to CTER , we welcome your papers. However, they need to meet the APA 5th edition guidelines before they are sent out for review.

I was quite excited when Joe Kotrlik, Neil Knobloch and I came up with the idea of inviting the authors of the top papers from the 2005 Association for Career and Technical Education Research (ACTER) Conference to submit to the journal. We all thought this would be a quick way to get 30(2) and 30(3) out. This was not the case. Many of those papers needed significant work after they were expanded from a conference paper to a journal manuscript. Once again, in most of those cases, the problem was weak theoretical frameworks. What we thought would be a quick review over one month turned out to take the better portion of the ’06 calendar year. We will end up publishing three of the five top papers within Volume 30.

At the 2006 ACTER Conference in Atlanta, Neil Knobloch and I will be presenting a session entitled “Effective Approaches to Getting Published in the CTER and JCTE.” Neil and I welcome anyone who would like a refresher on developing a quality research manuscript. We will be discussing these and other issues in more detail and how to address them.

While we have enough manuscripts to publish 31(1), we have nothing in the pipelines for 31(2) or 31(3). I would like to challenge all of us to seek ways to strengthen the research in the field and keep it moving forward!