About halfway though the final project for my graduate software engineering class at University of Hawaii at Manoa our professor asked us to consider the steps necessary for publishing our project. While I have been doing grant funded research during my graduate studies, I haven’t gotten to the point of publishing anything yet. Thankfully, we were provided some guidance questions to get us going:
As of the final deliverable, Peer Review Finder allows users to search for papers to review, review papers to earn tokens and spend tokens to post papers for others to review. For a detailed description of the project, please see the project’s home page.
Peer Review Finder’s GitHub Project Home Page
After researching some education related conferences and journals, our group determined that the Education Technology & Society (ET&S) journal would be a good fit for our project. We chose this journal because of its primary focus: how issues related to education can be affected by the use of technology over a long period of time (where “long period” is not defined but assumed to be at least a year). This fits perfectly into our project with finding research peer reviewers being a current issue in graduate studies.
While our project is very basic in its current state, I believe that, functionality wise, it is ready to be published to ET&S; we can compare the publication acceptance rates between graduate students who either use or do not use Peer Review Finder over a year. This is not to say that the project is ready for general consumption, and there are several challenges related to the collection of that data.
This is where we stumble onto a major issue: no users. How can we evaluate a project that has no users? How can we get new users? Unfortunately, we would need to solve the “no users” problem before we can evaluate this project, and that will likely not be an easy task.
Assuming for a moment that we can solve the “no users” problem, the evaluation necessary for publishing to ET&S would be fairly straightforward; simply survey graduate students who are publishing research for their acceptance/rejection rate, then compare to those who are using Peer Review Finder.
We are far off from being able to publishing any research related to this project, but it was an interesting process to go through to consider the steps to get there. It helped us understand that we are on the right track for this project, we just need the user base.