Reviewing for HERD: Shaping scholarship in higher education

The reviewing process is central to publication in HERDSA's journal Higher Education Research & Development. In this presentation I explore a number of issues around reviewing: the goals and the importance of the reviewing process, its ethical dimensions, its gate-keeping functions in relation to quality and standards in publication, its power to include and exclude and to thus shape the nature of research in higher education and the knowledge available for practice. I also consider whether gate-keeping can have a conservative function to inhibit the development of new ideas, practices and theories and to work only to confirm what we already know.