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Plagiarism is a continuing and growing concern in higher education and in academic publishing. Educating to avoid plagiarism requires ongoing efforts at all levels and clear policies that explain the several types of plagiarism and potential consequences when it is found. Identifying plagiarism requires complex judgments and is not a simple matter of using plagiarism detection software. Both social work programs and journals should establish clear and widely distributed policies regarding plagiarism. Ongoing education, care in course and assignment development, tracking incidents within each institution, and establishing clear policies may help reduce plagiarism and improve the quality of professional writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on publishing of social work literature. There are so many journals and so many articles that even the most ambitious reader cannot keep up. According to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which produces indexes of scientific papers, a very substantial portion of published articles never are cited subsequently. ISI staff counted how often papers published between 1981 and 1985 in the "top" 4,500 (out of 74,000) science journals had been cited in later papers. The shocking results of ISI's systematic study were that "45 percent of these supposedly top-quality papers received not a single citation in the five years afterward. The implication is that nearly half the scientific work in this country is basically worthless. It certainly is sobering to learn that so much published scientific work has such a short shelf life. The pressures on faculty to publish have become so great that it may be too threatening to publicly question whether the printed fruits of the written labor make any real difference. Too often, what seems to matter is whether the manuscript sees the light of day cast by a journal. What happens afterward may not seem like a burning concern.

This article describes one MW program's innovative and informed response to the pervasive problem of inadequate professional writing skills. We articulate the rationale, implementation, and assessment of our systemic response, which includes (a) requiring a professional writing course, (b) implementing curricular infusion of a standard writing rubric, (c) using sequential papers and peer reviews, (d) incorporating writing assessment into admissions decisions and culminating projects, (e) collaborating with the university writing center, (f) offering a writing coach, and (g) mentoring students for professional scholarship. This curricular case example provides specific and comprehensive strategies for other programs to address this ubiquitous educational concern, demonstrates adherence to CSWE's (2008) Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards in multiple dimensions, and contributes to literature on curriculum development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the role of the peer-review process in the editors' selection of high-quality manuscripts that meet the specific criteria for their journals and retain or raise their journal's prestige. Topics discussed include findings of a peer-review survey in 2009 where most respondents valued the peer-review process in improving the quality of their papers and the need to train new reviewers to improve the peer review process.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including curriculum mapping in a social work program; role of social workers in integrated health care settings; and use of experiential learning to help students understand the impact of food insecurity.

This paper updates, extends and refines a study published in this Journal a decade ago on the academic affiliation of social work authors. The study reported in this article looked at different types of journals and examined how a school `s productivity rank varied by type of journal, faculty size and over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses strategies on writing for publication in peer-reviewed journals. He provides suggestions for maintaining the integrity of submission such as knowing the methodological literature and its epistemological traditions, integrity of design and being consistent. He suggests paying particular attention to doing heavy lifting in writing pieces that the peers will evaluate to increase the likelihood of the article being accepted.

A review of literature related to the existence of an invisible college community among coauthors of articles in top-rated social work journals indicated that an invisible college could promote quality scholarship but that coauthoring might be inadequately studied or valued in social work education. Social network analysis revealed a skeletal piece of the top-rated social work journal coauthor network, visualized it, documented its growth between the overlap ping periods 2001-2005 and 2004-2008, and associated that growth with increasing citations of networked coauthors. Possible continued growth of the invisible college suggests the need to examine coauthoring, the means of evaluating coauthor contributions, and the content of social work scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning to write a scholarly literature review is often difficult for undergraduate students. This teaching note examines a pilot study of BSW students' use of a wiki to collaboratively write a literature review in a research course (N=36). Students expressed negative responses toward the assignment and were reluctant to use the wiki. Their responses are explored through an examination of their activity on the wiki, discussion group feedback, comments in the course evaluation, and unsolicited remarks made by students. Common criticisms raised by students were time-management issues, group coordination concerns, and assignment parameters. Suggestions for improving and modifying the assignment are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the importance of journal rankings to tenure, promotion, and other professional decisions, this study examines a new method for ranking social work journals. The Google Scholar h-index correlated highly with the current gold standard for measuring journal quality, Thomson Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factors, but provided data for more than 4 times as many disciplinary journals. Eighty disciplinary periodicals are identified and ranked using the Google Scholar h-index. The vast majority of these were ranked higher than the lowest ranked social work journal indexed by Thomson ISI. Although the results hold salience for many professional stakeholders, they may be of particular interest to faculty who publish in disciplinary journals not indexed by Thomson ISI. The Google Scholar h-index provides faculty with an additional tool to document the quality of the venues in which they publish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the developing a voice for academic writing with the importance of ideas, facts, and conclusions but to also have a point of view or stance. It mentions that can also be expressed in one's choice of research topics and with the need of courage when the manuscripts are rejected or receive harsh comments from reviewers.

This article presents the results of a national survey of 556 faculty at accredited schools of social work that examined 4 dimensions of the publishing process: publishing productivity, perceptions of overall quality of social work journals, satisfaction with social work journals, and perspectives on the manuscript review process. Qualitative analysis provided the basis for a discussion of strategies for improving the relevance, methodological rigor, and overall quality of professional social work journals.

The article explains the responsibility of the Council on Social Work Education to serve as honest brokers of knowledge via their publication, the "Social Work Education (SWE) journal. A key purpose of the Journal is to provide material to social work educators that improves the quality of professional education for students and, in turn, the quality of services provided to clients. People is assumed that the quality of education students receive influences the quality of services provided to clients. Being a helping profession highlights the educational goal of developing practitioners who provide helpful services to clients. The cascading influence of the quality of scholarship in the professions highlights the importance of candidness and critical appraisal. Professions benefit from inflated claims that are believed and acted on. Authors benefit by having their material published. Hiding limitations, use of methods that pretend to but cannot critically test questions addressed, inflated claims, and hiding controversies surrounding issues/concepts do not facilitate the growth of knowledge and honest brokering of knowledge. Indeed, these are classic propaganda strategies designed to encourage thought and action with little thought.

This article examines the publication productivity of 85W faculty, using self-reported data on journal articles, books, book chapters, and published conference proceedings. The authors analyze areas such as prevalent types of publications, topics addressed, journals in which articles appear, distribution of publications among respondents, and comparisons of productivity with various independent variables. Variables found to be related to productivity include size of both the institution and the social work program, faculty rank, public versus private auspices of the institution, administrative structure of the program, and institutional requirements for productivity. The article concludes by noting the parallel increases in demand for undergraduate faculty productivity and production of all types of publications, and by suggesting topics for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although considerable attention has been given to the publication productivity of social work faculty, less attention has been given to submission rates. Using a national sample of 264 full-time, African-American social work faculty, this study explores submission rates among social work faculty and examines the effects of gender, degree level, academic rank, tenure, and program type on manuscript submission. The results reveal that most of the manuscripts were submitted by a minority of the respondents, that about half of the respondents' submissions were accepted, and that high submission rates were significantly associated with being male and having a doctorate. Implications of the study's results for future research are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a letter to the editor which comments on the editorial and publication process of manuscripts of the "Journal of Social Work Education".