Editorial article: Ecotones, herbivory. acceptance rate and electronic access

WILSON, JB; WHITE, PS; BAKKER, JP; DÍAZ, S

JOURNAL OF VEGETATION SCIENCE

Opulus Press

Lugar: Uppsala; Año: 2004 vol. 15 p. 1 - 2

1100-9233

Each year, we choose a paper for the Editors? Award,  normally from among those nominated by the Coordinating  Editors (no money is handed out). This year,  the voting was tied, so we settled for two joint winners:  Walker et al. (2003) and Bakker & Olff (2003).  We had another problem this time: one of the papers  nominated had a Chief Editor as a subsidiary author and  another had the daughter of a Chief Editor as the first  author. According to our rules a paper with a Chief  Editor as first author can never win, and once we have a  shortlist a Chief Editor cannot vote on a paper that his/  her name appears on. We considered fiercer rules than  this, but we thought it unfair for a young scientist to miss  out on an award because s/he was associated with a  Chief Editor. Anyway, as it turned out the two Chief  Editors with any possible conflict of interest did not vote  at all. In spite of this, the name of one Chief Editor  appears on one of the joint awardees, and the daughter  of a Chief Editor on another. Sorry. We tried not to.  Everyone knows that vegetation scientists can have a trip  and call it research. We?d been to about the southernmost  point in N.Z., near Bluff, and written a paper on it (Wilson  et al. 1993). We?d done a study at the westernmost point,  West Cape. So we thought we?d head for about the northernmost  point, Cape Reinga. Just short of it we found the  ?Restaurant at the End of the Universe?, so it was clearly time  to start sampling. There were some ecotones around. We  knew from studying the literature that almost all assertions  about ecotones are untested (or when tested, wrong), so there  was our project. According to the philosophy of science one  is supposed to generate a theory, find the best place to test it,  and go there. We did the opposite: we found a nice place to  work first, and thought of the theory we were going to test  afterwards. We wonder how many vegetation scientists would  have to admit the same if they were really honest.?