Abstract
Background and Purpose: Survey research is one of the most commonly applied approaches in the social sciences. In the forest research it has been used for more than five decades. In spite of that or the fact that the amount of survey-based articles in the forest science journals has increased during the last decade, their share in all articles published in 20 forest science journals (9, 372 articles, 2005-2014) is quite modest (3.2%). In our paper we look at the opinions and attitudes of forest science journal editors towards survey research, as their perspective might enlarge our understanding of the use of this approach in the field of forestry. Materials and Methods: We selected 20 forest science journals - 15 from the SCI list and five non-SCI journals and contacted editors of these journals with the self-administered e-mail questionnaire. Data were collected in October 2014 and analyzed by descriptive statistics. The overall response rate was 75%. The assumptions for the study were based on the evidence addressing opinions and attitudes of journal editors from other research fields (finance) since no similar study was found in the field of forestry. Results: The majority of editors reported the same review process for survey-based articles as for all others. In two journals, articles with the survey-based content are screened more rigorously and in two journals their publishing is generally discouraged. 40% of journal editors hold the view that no difference should be made between survey research and other types of original research, and another 40% think that survey research should in the first place play a complementary role. As the main strength of survey research editors see the possibility to obtain data unavailable from other sources. They perceive adverse selection and the difficulty to generalize results as the main weaknesses. Conclusions: Editors of forest science journals have similar opinion on survey research as those from the field of finance. In both fields, survey-based articles typically undergo the same review process as all other original research articles. Journal editors were evenly split in their views if survey research should be considered equal or complementary to other types of original research. The two most commonly identified strengths and weaknesses differed just by the order.
Highlights
From all approaches the survey research is probably one of the most common ones that the social science employs in order to empirically disclose characteristics and interrelations of psychological and sociological variables [1]
By assuming that in the process of publishing research results the science journal editors play a crucial role [9, 16,17,18, 21, 22] we looked into what attitudes occur in the “population” of forest science journal editors with respect to survey research
We asked editors of 20 forest science journals (11 male and 3 female editors) that are geographically distributed as shown in Table 1, to answer 6 questions from the questionnaire we sent them via e-mail
Summary
From all approaches the survey research is probably one of the most common ones that the social science employs in order to empirically disclose characteristics and interrelations of psychological and sociological variables [1]. In our paper we look at the opinions and attitudes of forest science journal editors towards survey research, as their perspective might enlarge our understanding of the use of this approach in the field of forestry. As the main strength of survey research editors see the possibility to obtain data unavailable from other sources They perceive adverse selection and the difficulty to generalize results as the main weaknesses. Conclusions: Editors of forest science journals have similar opinion on survey research as those from the field of finance. In both fields, survey-based articles typically undergo the same review process
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