European Journal of Physics: 2016 Reviewer Awards
Reviewer of the Year: Professor Carl Mungan, US Naval Academy, United States
Despite winning the Reviewer of the Year Award, Professor Carl Mungan considers himself to be an ordinary faculty member doing his job. He reviews for the European Journal of Physics (EJP) as a service to the greater community of physics educators and to improve the final articles published by the journal.
Professor Mungan stands out, however, because he is not afraid to be honest in his approach to manuscripts. His advice to first-time reviewers is to make bold suggestions, to be specific and to provide examples of how the research could be presented, rather than simply pointing out errors, inaccuracies or ambiguous wording. He believes reviewers should do their best to quickly reply to authors, who are eagerly awaiting a response.
When reviewing, Professor Mungan looks for papers that have a cogent storyline, would be of reasonable, general interest to physics educators, and are technically correct. An article that particularly fascinated him was: The young centre of the Earth, having been struck by the idea that the centre of the Earth is a few years younger than the surface of the Earth due to gravitational time dilation.
Professor Mungan is gratified when he is able to make suggestions to an article that has good ideas but is poorly written. One suggestion he would have for EJP’s peer review process would be to champion concise manuscripts, so that novel or interesting content does not become lost in lengthy papers.
Outstanding Reviewers
- Dr Enrique Arribas, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
- Professor Iver Brevik, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
- Professor Brian Burrows, Staffordshire University, UK
- Dr Mark Denny, Private address, Canada
- Professor Dennis Dieks, Universiteit Utrecht, Netherlands
- Dr Biswaranjan Dikshit, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, India
- Professor Bejo Duka, University of Tirana, Albania
- Professor V Epp, Tomsk State Pedagogical University, Russia
- Professor Francisco Fernandez, Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquimicas Teoricas y Aplicadas (INIFTA), Argentina
- Mr Yin Hsien Fung, Dodd-Walls Centre, New Zealand
- Dr Ross Galloway, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Professor Dr Aleksandar Gjurchinovski, St Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia
- Professor Judy Hardy, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Professor Bernhard Hoenders, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands
- Professor Dr Mithat Idemen, Okan University, Turkey
- Professor Jose Iniguez, University of Salamanca, Spain
- Dr C Isenberg, University of Kent, UK
- Professor Y Kobayashi, Soka University, Japan
- Professor Wolfgang Lucha, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
- Dr Jonas Persson, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
- Professor Craig Savage, The Australian National University, Australia
- Dr B Suits, Michigan Technological University, United States
- Professor F M Toyama, Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan
- Mr Matthew Trainer, University of Glasgow, UK
- Professor Dr Mustafa Turkyilmazoglu, Hacettepe Universitesi, Turkey
- Dr Maurizio Vannoni, European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility GmbH, Germany