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THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ECONOMICS AND BUILDING VOL.2 NO.2   i 

EDITORIAL 

 

The publication of this second issue for 2002 completes our commission as editors of the jour-

nal for now. Once again we were faced with the daunting prospect of selecting from a substan-

tial number of papers submitted (21 in total) and we hope that the papers that we have chosen, 

in consultation with our referees, will be both interesting useful. As was the case with the previ-

ous issue, we have been fortunate in having a panel of eminent people from various countries to 

referee the papers in addition to the many staff of the Faculty of Design Architecture and Build-

ing at UTS who assisted in the refereeing process. 

In reviewing the contributions and selecting papers for publication we were faced with some 

fundamental questions, not the least of which was the question of exactly what criteria we would 

use in assessing papers. It may seem simple: separate the “good” papers from the “bad” papers 

(the “wheat” from the “chaff”) and print the former. There are, however, some other concerns 

that need to addressed before we even get to the point of thinking about what constitutes a 

“good” or “bad” paper. The most important of these is related to the nature of the journal itself: 

it is a refereed journal but one that serves two professional bodies, the AIB and the AIQS, and 

therefore we should give consideration to presenting papers that will be of interest to their 

members, and not only to academics. On the other hand, as both bodies have their own profes-

sional journals, in which practitioner papers and articles regularly appear, we have generally 

steered away from papers that we feel fall into that category. 

In assessing papers for publication we have always looked for those that have a clear objective 

and that then investigate or pursue that objective in a clear and logical manner. In keeping with 

our aim of publishing papers that will be of some interest to all our readers we have also looked 

for clarity in the writing and reporting of research outcomes. It is unfortunate that often what is 

good research (in our opinion and that of our referees) is devalued because the reporting of it is 

unclear or just simply difficult to read. The end result is a paper with content that makes it wor-

thy of publication but an outcome that is, overall, too muddy for anyone but a dedicated editor, or 

perhaps another researcher, to plough through. 

It could be argued that writing papers for refereed journals is all about content and not about 

style, i.e., that it is the research and the conclusions drawn from the research that are impor-

tant. Further it may be argued that it is not the purpose of serious research to produce light 

reading matter, however, construction is a practical business and if the people in the profes-

sions that serve the industry are to benefit from research then surely the research outcomes 

need to be communicated to those may make use of them—otherwise what purpose does the 

research serve apart from looking good on academic resumes? 

This is not to say that we have rejected more than half of the papers submitted because we 

thought they were poorly written—several were very well written but were basically literature 

reviews that will eventually form part of a thesis for the authors’ postgraduate degrees. Others 

did not clearly follow their stated objectives; a few were just not original enough or rigorous 

enough to displace papers that did report original research well. In any case we have tried to be 

fair and consistent, or at least fairly consistent.  

Our thanks must again go the Editorial Board plus the UTS referees who willingly donated their 

time and expertise, the contributors who accepted our decisions and suggestions with good 

grace, and Sally Beech, who has done her usual professional job of putting the issue into print-

able format. 

Producing the 2002 issues of the journal has been a challenging but edifying job, and we wish 

our colleagues at RMIT every success with Volume 3. 

 

Rick Best 

Goran Runeson 

December 2002