Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:58:43 -0400
Reply-To: Chang Chung <chang_y_chung@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Chang Chung <chang_y_chung@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: SUG peer-review and authorship
On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:03:20 -0400, Viel, Kevin <kviel@SJHA.ORG> wrote:
...
> Either way, I was hoping for a formal peer review.
...
Hi,
I have no doubt that some of the SAS conference papers are of a very high
quality that will have no problem going through a rigorous anonymous
multiple peer review process.
But at the same time, there will be a lot more papers that would not
survive any peer-review processes, mine likely being one. :-) And frankly,
I doubt that there are many experts who are capable and willing to do
manuscript reviews so that it is practical to put together an SGF-size
conference every year.
It is also true, however, that we need more reviews. Especially for the
published conference papers. This is not just for user-written, contributed
papers, but papers written by SAS employees as well. For instance, I see
the following code in one of the papers in the SGF2010 SAS Presents
section. I don't think this code would have published if there waw a peer-
review process. (Recently I see more pieces of sas code that have this,
hard to describe, weird, or half-brain-dead "feel." Maybe this is the
"feel" of machine-generated code, but I digress.)
filename REQUEST temp;
DATA _NULL_;
FILE REQUEST;
INPUT;
PUT _INFILE_;
CARDS4;
q=%23SGF10&ppr=1500;
filename twtOut "\\twitter\out\SASTweets.xml";
%let twUser='USERNAME';
%let twPass='PASSWORD';
proc http
in=REQUEST
out=twtOut
...
I think one way out of this situation is to develop outlets for a well-
written, high-quality SAS papers, in addition to conference proceedings. I
am sorry to mention a competitor, but STATA has a nice journal published
quarterly since 2002. It has both full-length articles and short notes. The
papers are "reviewed" -- it does not say "peer-reviewed" nor "anonymously"
-- and has established enough credibility so that it is now indexed and
abstracted in the likes of CompuMath Citation Index, RePEC, SciSearch, and
SSCI.
There is already a journal called "Pharmaceutical Programming" (http://
maney.co.uk/index.php/journals/pha/), which has some potential of going
toward this direction, but it is not for SAS alone and it has too narrow a
scope for all the SAS users out there.
Cheers,
Chang
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