Upon first glance at the journal I read “An
International Journal of Mathematics Education.” Subsequently I decided to investigate to see
how internationally diversified the journal actually was. Upon looking over the references, I noticed
that almost all of the authors were either from England or The
Netherlands. There was the occasional
author from Germany, Turkey, or The United States, but a large majority were
from England or The Netherlands. The
journal itself is published and printed in Canada. I would have liked to have seen more articles
that were written by Canadian authors, or authors from countries outside of
Europe to offer a more internationally holistic perspective. While five different countries is fairly
diversified, they are all classified as first world countries. I then decided to see where the authors
writing the articles were based out of.
From this I saw some greater diversification.
Secondly, I looked over the articles
themselves to see if there were any noticeable connections between them. The articles seemed to discuss vastly
different topics. I wonder how the
editors decided to group them together.
Does the image on the cover allude to some overarching theme? The articles do seem to be all very similar
in length (6-8 pages). I also found it
interesting that occasionally there would be an “Editor’s Note” at the end of
the article. They seem to be used when
the editor wishes to add a contribution to the article. I wonder if they need the permission from the
author to do this. While it is intended
to aid in the understanding of the article, it may also take away from the point
that the author is trying to make.
Lastly, upon visiting the website I noticed
that the journal’s intent is to bring forth potential ideas for
discussions. Perhaps this is the reason
for a variety of article topics. If one
of the articles in particular receives
an abundance of feedback, perhaps other authors will pursue the field further.
There seem to be two similarities between the 1st and 100th issues. One similar aspect is a lack of Canadian authors in this Canadian-published journal. According Bingjie's analysis, 22 out of the 52 writers in the three selected issues of FLM were Canadian which is almost 50% of all the writers. It is odd that the majority of the authors in both issues were not domestic. I wonder if the Canadian authors were better represented in other volumes of the journal. I am not surprised that the articles in both issues are of similar length because a length of 2500 - 5000 words per article was prescribed.
ReplyDeleteThe illustrations on the covers of the 1st and 100th issues are both similar to and different from each other. While the cover pictures of both issues present geometric elements of some sort, the 100th issue clearly illustrates the connection between vectors and matrices in linear algebra, yet the pictures of the 1st issue does not establish a clear relationship between geometry and algebra.
Dr. Wheeler was the editor of both Vol.1 #1 and Vol.17 #2 of FLM. In both issues, he has included Coxeter's tessellation of the plane. It is identical. I wonder what images were used on the cover pages of other FLM issues when he was the editor. Did he publish other tessellations from Coxeter?
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