Response Rates and Responsiveness for Surveys, Standards, and the Journal

The Journal has regularly published the results of survey research. As an academy we seem to be very interested in learning what our faculty members and students think, how they perform, and what is going on at other schools and colleges of pharmacy. A survey is often the best approach to acquiring that knowledge. However, the Editors believe that survey research published in the Journal has varied in quality and that standards for survey research can be used to improve the quality of research in the academy and the quality of papers published in the Journal. With that in mind, a decision was made in early 2008 to clarify expectations for survey research manuscripts submitted to the Journal. In Volume 72, Issue 1 of the Journal, Draugalis and colleagues1 presented an excellent paper detailing “best practices” for survey research manuscripts. These standards are now recommended to authors and reviewers, and will be used by the Editors in making decisions regarding acceptance of manuscripts. One item addressed in the paper1 was the importance of response rates to questionnaire research, while another issue dealt with sample representativeness. The Draugalis et al1 paper and an examination of previously published survey research manuscripts in the Journal has led to the application of more stringent expectations for manuscripts published in the Journal.