In the following lines, we briefly introduce some reflections and, above all, some questions derived from the editorial work. The editorial work is the daily exercise of receipt the texts that come into our magazine, read them, consider their pertinence, send them to pairs evaluation, analyze and compare the concepts of evaluators, participate in discussions in editorial committees, take decisions related to the magazine’s emphasis, to the themes we wish to prioritize etc. These reflections arise because we believe that a magazine is, besides the diffusion function of research-derived knowledge, partly a laboratory to think about the academic writing practices, to analyze them and reflect on the variables that integrates them. From this perspective, as an editorial team, we have posed a series of questions that we will raise in a systematic and formal way in subsequent issues. For now, we just want to outline some of them.

Generally, scientific journals policies, including magis, prioritize the publishing of articles that will account for results and processes of scientific and technologic research. The main goal of these articles must be to communicate to the academics of a specific field, clearly and specifically, the results of researches, ideas and debates. This type of articles are considered important because they allow the flow of progresses and that “leading edge” conceptual, methodological and epistemological developments would be known and debated by the respective academic community. This socialization and discussion function is a clear contribution of scientific publications to the development of knowledge.

The practice of scientific text writing has generated a self textual typology in which the research article and the research process-derived essay appear as frequent formats. Due to the importance of these textual types in academic publications, is very common to find, in magazine’s call for papers, some literature and directions that try to guide authors on their adequate writing. For instance, it looks like there is an agreement about the structure for articles, identifying four key sections: introduction, methodology, results and discussion. Structurally, these sections have been interiorized by the researchers. However, in the articles evaluation processes it is notorious that a high percentage of evaluating pairs suggests improvements to the manuscripts in relation to the limited development of the discussion section and its problematization. Evaluators say that, in many cases, authors are shy when state hypothesis about the founded results. This causes that well written and suggestive articles stay as descriptive research reports and do not go forward to the field of production of new conceptual constructions or interpretations of the studied subject.

As we all know, a research is valuable according to some internal attributes related to the research process such as: rigor of procedures, clarity on the analytic approaches choice, data processing instruments and techniques and clarity on the results presentation. Besides those attributes, common to any research, the acknowledgment of the article’s value is highly related to the acceptation among the research pairs community.

In many cases, that search for acknowledgment is related to the “scientific” nature of the research. Regarding to the research-related texts writing, that search for scientificity becomes a reality in an adequate writing of the procedures, approaches and techniques used to make progress in the research process. This component is a research condition because it must be clear from where do we extract our results, what conditions makes them possible, what procedures authorize them. To render explicit those elements is a complex job that is not always achieved because, among some other things, the brevity of the text permitted by the article’s format does not allow the writers account for everything they wished. Yet, usually, a good article can actually account for those components even if it is summarized.

In other cases, due to those space restrictions for writing, it is possible to see an absence in the explanation of the epistemological position and on the decisions related to the research approach choice. This absence generates the feeling that the choice of a particular epistemology and an approach that supports the research, are problematic issues. We all know that before the choice of these positions, researches have reflected and they have taken very important decisions, because there are not neutral epistemologies or transparent techniques. We know that there are tight links between the scientific and ideological interests and the methodological and epistemological decisions of researchers, elements that are, not always, present in the articles.

We might say that this kind of situations will not always be related to the extension of the article; more likely they will be related to the communicative intention of the researcher. In several opportunities, the researcher wishes to communicate those things that, according to them, provide safety - or maybe certainty- about the results that are being studied on the article; otherwise, a legitimate decision. This way, they leave out aspects that might provide more elements to the comprehension, like the ones before mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, and, of course, they highlight others such as the before mentioned about methodological aspects.

Finally, another element suggested on the observations of our evaluators is that the search for acknowledgment is marked by the status of science that the researcher or the researchers team give to their research exercise. The way to write our texts does not come from that complex tension, meaning that, in the writing processes of our articles, we cannot leave aside the science and scientificity representation from which we make the research. The texts seem to be surrounded by questions like: ¿which characteristics must the text have to be considered scientific? Sometimes, judging by the evaluator pairs observations, that scientificity seems to be achieved on the impeccable description of procedures and analysis techniques.

But, according to the evaluating pairs, in some cases that good descriptive development is not compatible with the interpretative bets, with the results explanation frameworks and with their projection. In some cases, the voice of the researcher seems to be left hidden behind the procedures and research techniques. We then pose a question about the place of the researcher in their own text. It is also probable that, in its imagination, those who research give an important value to the data, to the discovered information and to the description. For a long time, the research was, indeed, based on the pretension of “objectivity”, understood as the possibility of a certain correspondence among the phenomenon and what it has being said about it. This search causes that, occasionally, a correspondence between enunciation and data is forced. This might lead to the exhaustion of the discourse in the description section when presenting the information. After all, it is possible to be on a more safe ground when we demonstrate the existence of what is real instead of make inferences from the interpretative frameworks, because on these, the positions, approaches and perspectives play an important role and make the research-produced “reality” a phenomenon not always “real”.

As we can note, the questions derived from this reflections are much more than the certainties. This preoccupation will continue being a reflection subject of the editorial magis team and we hope to approach it in a more formal way on next issues.