(Re)Viewing a Review: A Case History of the Review of Educational Research

When we took over as editors of RER three years ago, we found ourselves puzzling over a very fundamental question: is a Given that RER is a journal which has at its heart the purpose of reviews, this was a VERY serious question. Our acceptance of the offer to edit the journal came out of particular interests towards equity and diversity and the ways these issues are addressed (and not) by the publication process. We believed that issues of equity and diversity are integral to our question, What is a review? We were confident that we could learn about these issues during our term as editors. We assembled a smart group of people to be on our Consulting Editorial Board, we worked hard at developing a statement for our call for manuscripts, and we waited to find the answer. At the 1997 AERA Annual Meeting, we organized a session in which we asked scholars from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives to ponder the very question we were living with in our work with the journal and found ourselves fascinated with the richness of their replies to a question that made most people throw up their hands. Still puzzling over the question, we decided to focus our attention on a historical examination of RER to try to get a sense of the issue of access. We believed that the academic community's notions of a review is constructed by who has access to the journal-i.e., who were the editors, reviewers, advisors, and readers. This issue is one that can be explored from a number of levels: Who has access to the pages of RER as a place to publish? Who has access to the information in the reviews? knowledge is framed as legitimate for review and how is that related to content and methods? We had a hunch that examining the evolution of reviews over the life of RER might provide a window into changes in the power dynamics of research and publication and ground the changes we were hoping to promote today in historical conditions that shaped our work in ways that we were until now unaware. We examined work which has appeared in RER since its first volume in 1931, focusing on several broad questions/issues. We were interested in the ways that both educational issues and educational research found their way into the journal over time. Who decided what topics were of interest to the readership and what approaches were used and recognized as legitimate as the field worked to build a knowledge base? We were also interested in understanding the purposes 384