You’ll notice that I’ve just posted the survey/data table combo for Ethics. The survey for this journal includes two new questions under the personal information section; one for gender and one for race/ethnic background.

A Note About Race/Ethnic Background
I’ve decided to let people manually enter in their race and ethnicity. The plus side to this is that people can enter in multiple categories. For example, suppose someone identified with two different races and a minority ethnicity. They would be able to enter in all three. Also, a multiple choice race/ethnic background occasionally doesn’t include all the options that some people think should be included. Letting people enter in what they’d like avoids this concern as well.

The draw back to this is that there will be no neat and tidy way to generate acceptance rate data for this category (at least initially). Once I see what the raw data is, I can go back and generate reports (something I may do every 6 months or so). Also, other people will be able to generate their own Google spreadsheets that automatically use the values from the raw data in this spread sheet (I’ll post a tutorial about that later on when the surveys are all up and running).

Phil Wiki Imports
Another issue I ‘ve encountered is that it is difficult (in some cases) to pair final verdict entries with initial verdict entries. This has some bearing on whether or not we can get an accurate port of acceptance rates from the Phil Journal Wiki.

Here’s an example. Suppose in the initial verdict you have 20 entries, but in the final verdict column you only have 19 entries. Do you pair a final verdict of “Accept” with an initial verdict of “Accept” or “R&R”? If you pair it with “Accept” and are wrong, then misreport the overall acceptance rate (and the R&R acceptance rate) as lower than it actually is. If, however, you erroneously pair it with “R&R” then you inflate both the overall acceptance rate and the R&R acceptance rate. You get a similar problem with how to pair entries that say “Reject”. It’s pretty clear that some people report “Reject” (or “Accept”) in both categories, and some people don’t because they think it’s redundant.

I’m wondering if I should perhaps only import review times from the phil wiki.