Harry Shannon
This morning I got an email from Emerald Publishing, publishers of hundreds of academic journals. The email began:
“In August 2020, we commissioned a global survey to gather views on change within the academic sector. The survey was sent to a random selection of 172,033 academics, librarians and students within Emerald’s literati community.”
OK, so far, so good. The next sentence read: ”A total of 1,274 literati from 188 countries responded.”
Well, 1,274 is a lot of replies, a pretty good sample size, a lot bigger than many studies you read about in the news. And they’re from all over the world, which means there’s diversity. So this must be important and useful information they got.
Actually no. Of all the people they asked, less than 1% replied (just one in 135). They’re so unrepresentative it’s ridiculous to claim, as the email did, that they got ”a good viewpoint into the topics that matter.“
As Eileen, my wife, noted: They may be literati, but certainly not numerati.
What’s particularly ironic is that if they submitted a paper with a 1% response rate to one of their journals, it would – and certainly should – be rejected. A pity they didn’t get their report peer-reviewed before they published it.