 We continue with our effort of positioning psychology in the country and till now our focus was primarily we began with the UG teaching, the PG teaching and primarily quality was a major concern that was divided at large and there were you know several suggestions the way forward. Today now we shift our focus to the research outcomes primarily in terms of journal articles in terms of book chapters, in terms of volumes that one publishes the challenges, the issues, concerns but primarily trying to say that what is the way forward. This is just to have a cumulative experience of people who have been in the profession for years have contributed you know significantly to the area, how their collective experience can be utilized by the forthcoming researchers so that they can also make their mark and they can take psychology from where it exists today to some other level. With me I have you know Professor Ajit Dalal who was the editor of psychology and developing societies and Professor Grishwari Mishra who continues to be the editor of editor in chief of psychological studies. Professor Ramadhar Singh who happens to be the associate editor of I am management review. I will first ask Professor Dalal that having your long experience as an editor of a journal what type of trend did you see in the article submitted to your journal also do you describe the issues and methodology in these submissions how did you find the quality, your comments about the quality of scientific publications in psychology in India at large. Well I took over the editor of the journal psychology and developing societies in 2001 that was the I took over the editor and this particular journal the psychology and developing society was started in 1989 by Professor Dugan Sinha as a journal of the developing countries and the whole emphasis and the focus of this journal was that we should be able to highlight and bring out the issues which are more pertinent relevant for the developing countries. So that was the idea was to publish those articles which are not non-western nature and which are highlighting the reality of this particular region and he was editor there for some time then Professor Asitapati took over as editor of the journal and I took over the journal in 2001 of the one and what I see is I when I took over the journal journal was already established brought out by stage as one of the prominent journal in this particular field because of the efforts of the earlier editors the journal was well known in the developing countries and it was well circulated and what we idea we had that there should be articles in this journal half of the article should be from India other half of the article should come from other developing countries and primarily we were focusing on the Latin America, African countries, South Asian countries and other countries where you know psychology and which are we as which are still developing. Now when I look at the as editor I continue to be the editor of the journal for 12 years and when I look back at these 12 years as editor I saw that journal was in a way doing well in the sense of bringing out the scenario concern of the developing countries in one sense but if you look in terms of the research methodology in terms of the content of these articles and you look in terms of the issues which they were bringing up I think I found that there was a there was a there was a change remarkable change which I could see is that more and more people from developing countries were really writing for these but for a journal and our concern was that they were writing for the journal they were sending articles with good ideas not very good methodology or proper methodology they have been using but the ideas were really they had ideas which were worth publishing and many times in the beginning I remember that the articles from African countries the those countries where they did not have the research culture or the kind of proper training these articles have to be rewritten have to be revised and has to be you know properly grammatically in the proper English it has to be revised because they were having doing a good work but did not have the good language so that was the we think we got many of these articles which were published in the initial stage of my leadership that we did this job of rewriting these articles and rewriting in terms of language not in terms of ideas and concepts but in terms of the idea in the language and these articles were published and the whole idea was that people from and the scholars from these regions should be encouraged to bring and make submission to the journal and I found that what we had we have a point we had as a part of editorial board which was practice one before that we had the a kind of advisory board of the journal in which we selected scholars very many scholars from North America from South America countries from South Asian countries reason wise we took the whole idea was that these will will find these articles find the people who can write for the journal make the submission to the journal they hold but was in that particular region they will encourage scholars to submit the articles and that thing was we have worked for some time and it did not work for some time and the what I find in terms of review articles in turn in terms of conceptual articles they were good articles we were receiving but in terms of the articles which were of empirical nature were gradually becoming less and less one the earlier they were not many but the articles for less were of empirical nature and conceptually taking up the issues of the developing countries that was happening and initially there were many scholars who have contributed to articles but gradually and slowly what I was finding that the new input in the journal was and in terms of from India particularly the nature of articles and the kind of articles we were receiving was not of that quality quality was in terms of particularly for the empirical article that the quality of the articles in terms of methodology in terms of conceptualization and in terms of understanding the implication of what they are saying because you know most of the articles I what I found that when they submitted an article they write at the end of the article one paragraph as a ritual the implication of this work I thought that may not be a sufficient way of understanding the rest of making a writing article and making it a applied implication that should be written in the article right from the beginning that the issues and the concerns that was one of the thing which I found was a problem another thing which I saw that in terms of the quoting the Indian work I found that in most of these articles which were from developing countries from India also most of the work which they were quoting if you look at the list of the references they were giving hardly there was any Indian work which was they were quoting most of the research which was they were referring to was from the western countries and the emphasis which we were really putting in that if they are writing from the developing countries point of view there should be material and there should be literature which is brought out from this country another thing which I found that as an editor I found that increasing more than more and more number of articles had to be returned back as they came I think our acceptance rate right from the beginning was beginning it was much more 30 percent 35 percent but increasing I was finding that it was reducing number of entries were more but I think we were outright rejecting more than 50 percent of the articles at the desk of the editor because they will not go to the stage of sending them to any reviewer only on the desk of the editor we did not find these articles even worth reviewing and the number of articles which were of that nature was increasing so during my period I found that more than 50-60 percent articles were to return as they came these are the problems which were we are experiencing that there were more submissions but quality of submission was very poor getting poor and poor another problem which I experienced from the period that getting good reviews for the articles even if we accept that we are publishing the journal twice a year two issues and that is what not much we are publishing we found 15 or maybe more than 15-18 articles in a whole year in one particular volume and even finding reviewers to look at these articles to give the proper feedback that was going down and down we were not finding and another thing which I found is that if you send a reviewer outside India it is easy to get a reviewer within the stupid period one month or two months or three months but many times we are sending it to Indian reviewers the problem is that unless you keep on reminding you can keep on requesting them to send the reviewer as early as possible many times the reviewers are not coming many times they are not sending the and that was another problem so we tried to find out some of the reviewers which will be more committed to this kind of work and we did found some and I think they did a good job in reviewing some articles but this problem persisted till I left the journal that increasingly it was finding we are finding it difficult to find reviewers and many times on the basis of only we thought we will have two anonymous review for each article but many times we had to only confine to one other contingencies you know that the journal has to be brought out and the review has not come so we will do some kind of in-house viewing of the article that was happening and knew that because of this in-house reviewing is not the right way of doing it but there were compulsions of time because journal has to be brought out in the on time this was one thing I found and I thought that one important thing is that if the reviewers can pay of the writers can pay more attention to the whole idea was that if you are sending the article and articles are being sent by those you know the journal editor is a very difficult job you somebody submits an article and he is an eminent scholar somewhere he is a professor somewhere he is a senior to me and if I reject the paper on the basis of the review which I am getting if I say this paper was not worth publishable this creates a kind of serious problem for the editor I think I face this problem very often that I have to say no and this no is not taken as no it is not taken very kindly and they would make all kind of personal attributions that why this paper was not accepted and my concern was that if you can maintain the quality as much as possible and strictly look to the professional criteria and many times it is for a detail one which has to be very professional in the to bring out the journal you have to make sometimes some kind of compromises so that beside that but I think what we the happened to the journal that the readers show the journal was increasing I think she was bringing out this journal I think in the beginning we had only a small few countries where the journal was going and when I left the journal the journal was going to more than 45 countries all around and there was so that way circulation went up the visibility of the journal went up but I would not say that the quality of the papers you are publishing was commensurate with that kind of visibility or that kind of standard which was wanted to maintain that was becoming increasing getting good article and so what we used to do in between is to like people personally requesting people may have to do that we request people to contribute or send us an article those were really active in the field and doing work and this is to managing a journal you have to manage many of these things encouraging people doing this kind of a job which is a difficult job of giving a negative feedback but I think in the process my whole concern was that if this journal as a reading journal can be its quality can be maintained well I would now seek the experience of professor Grishwari Mishra for long he has been the deterrent chief of psychological studies your concern about the quality of scientific publication in psychology in India especially with reference to the publications and the submissions to psychological studies the journal psychological studies started with the initiative of professor B. Krishnan long back in 1956 subsequently it was being edited by professor Farooqi and it was in 2000 that the national academy of psychology requested professor Farooqi who because of his ill health and old age expressed the view that if someone is interested to publish this journal you would like to give that journal to the association or the person and the now came forward and it was decided that it will become the chief organ of national academy of psychology and the academy asked me to act as its editor from 2000 to 2009 I had to do everything for the journal as editor, as publisher and it was a very difficult exercise in terms of getting support for publication and we had very tough time to organize the journal and gradually the journal became more and more popular amongst the colleagues in India and we found that a variety of articles were submitted and gradually with the experience we developed a particular orientation in terms of organizing the different issues of the journal for instance we decided that in each year there will be one issue where we will publish one target article by one colleague and there will be commentaries by at least two or three colleagues and the author will respond to that this was an idea to facilitate and making certain issues prominent I remember one such issue was of the Indian mindset and the article was written by Professor J. B. P. Sinha and his colleague and then we had responses from three colleagues and then there was response to that so this was one initiative in addition to that we also organized special issues on important themes for instance we have one issue on self and identity and I'm really happy to share that we could get contributions from many senior colleagues including Raya Bhavmister Mark Leary Shreema and many others and there was good response to such an issue similarly we organized one issue on social constructionism and focusing on the work of Kenneth Gargan that also received good response to from colleagues we had many such issues one was also on health and well-being so this was one way to create a focus in research publications but everything is not well with the journal I would like to share the journey through the last one decade or so when we were engaged in increasing the number of issues the size of the journal we had to create more and more resources we did get some support from ICSR but it was quite difficult in 2009 we were able to get support from Springer and that created a new scenario with the help of Springer we went for joint publication of Now and Springer and now the submissions were made electronically a system was created to get the articles reviewed to contact the authors to get submissions at various stages by authors and reviewers that has streamlined the process and now things are in place and the journal is doing quite well at the same time I would like to draw attention to some of the important features that demand attention of authors for instance many of the authors give a lot of references and at times many references are irrelevant they are not relevant to the theme just to cite many references and indicating that this work relates to many other kinds of efforts made by researchers people bring in a lot of information it is something which is quite problematic in the sense that many authors start with writings of others and indicate that I am doing this particular research because so and so theory, so and so research tells these things so here is my hypothesis and then again towards the end they will come back and say that my work goes with the research the findings which were obtained by those who provided the initial input for my research I do not see any progress in terms of ideas in terms of contribution this is an important lecuna the kind of critical reflection which is required to contribute to knowledge developing specific hypotheses is missing in many of the contributions and we have to ask the authors to revise the article we often reject the articles submitted by the authors on account of inadequate theoretical argument or analysis of past research we also find that many of the articles deal with issues which are really not issues worthwhile for pursuing the research I would like to mention that doing good research requires a critical understanding and identifying a good research question there are numerous variables and one can relate any variable with n number of variables and there is no point in pursuing this kind of arbitrary selection of variables and relating to them for instance age, grade are very common variables and one goes for frequent analysis of variation across these variables and there is no theorization there is no understanding about the nature of variables whether the variables are categorical, nominal ordinal or interval these issues hardly get attention of the researchers so the kind of research culture which is prevailing and the kind of research which is being done lacks this kind of distinction this kind of vivac that what should be the right kind of question which question is worth pursuing so we had to take tough stand and many colleagues are annoyed because of the problems of the editor but if we have to progress if we have to contribute to knowledge we need to take stands in terms of the qualitative standards pertaining to a particular piece of work editing is a very difficult job where one has to respond to the reviewers as well as authors we are trying to seek cooperation from reviewers from India as well as abroad we are successful to some extent but it is a difficult job as I have observed reviewers need to attend to many aspects of an article they need to think about the relevance of the work they need to examine whether the methodology has been followed suitably or not they have to see whether proper inference has been drawn or not they have to decide whether there is any substantial contribution to theory method or application pertaining to a particular piece which has been submitted to the journal it is a tough job it requires time it requires reading current literature it is unfortunate that there are not many people who are interested in taking up this kind of challenge I think there should be some component of this kind of review work in training at doctoral level where students are required to read articles critically and learn to examine the critical components of a given piece of research this kind of insight is missing in many students I think that should be made part of training how to learn about the nuances we often follow the APA style of writing and it is very difficult to train everybody in that because people are not familiar with that and if one follows that style the APA manual one will have to understand the details of organizing a manuscript using proper language and putting things in a manner which should be the mode of publication in scientific domain in public sphere I must say that research is important but publication of research too is important it is more important than merely submitting the work and putting that in library I think it is sin if the work is done and it is not put in the public sphere knowledge has to be disseminated I think doing that will reduce the kind of duplication which is taking place we find that the same kind of topic is being used in research at many centers in many university departments without any kind of movement or progress in terms of cumulative knowledge if we want to bring in change in the quality of publication it is very crucial that we make ourselves updated psychology is a discipline which is growing very fast it has many many traditions there is qualitative research tradition there are quantitative methods I often see that most of the studies end up with a simple correlation or a t-test or a simple ANOVA we also find that a very small sample is used and claims are made of very high order if we examine international publications most of the journals now publish a series of studies a number of experiments where people replicate the findings extend the understanding which emerges and ready to the influence of various mediators and moderators so the kind of demand in terms of quality of research which is available in the literature at international level and the way we think in our universities and most of the student departments there is a gap between the two we need to bridge this gap so in terms of statistical analysis for example we find that confirmatory factor analysis or a discriminant function analysis or other higher order statistics are use of MANOVA these are the things which are very common in international publications the training of research training for research which is available in Indian context misses these new techniques there is hardly improvement in terms of the repertoire of statistical techniques are use of good quality quality to research in the research traditions that are going on so in order to improve the quality of publication it is important to bring in these changes in the training at doctoral level I also feel that the articles often relate to the kind of theories, concepts, perspectives which has a kind of origin in purely western cultural context I sincerely think that the human science research has to be local in terms of the questions that are raised we need to address problems which are present in our society and qualitatively the work which is rooted in specific cultural setting can provide better insights and there can be give and take the traditions of research in different cultural contexts this kind of awareness is also missing we consider theories as universal we treat data as universal we hardly examine the specific cultural context while articulating the concerns and issues with which we deal with now is high time that we move towards a system of training at post graduate as well as doctoral level where writing or scientific writing gets an important place data analysis gets a new kind of input only then we will be able to achieve the goals of quality publication and there is one more important point that point is that researchers in India often get stimulation from the work done by colleagues in other countries in other cultural contexts they hardly refer to the work done by Indian psychologists even those studies which have received international recognition are not looked into while designing the studies so I think there is very little impact of Indian research on Indian research I want to emphasize this point that the understanding that has been gained is not used to further knowledge in our culture it is a very sad state of affairs the ICSR has completed 5 rounds of research surveys I have been associated with the 5th round of survey I am also editing the 6th survey what I find is that people are not using those analyses those kinds of conclusions and they hardly go into the details of that it requires attention of teaching departments and those who are supervising students that they should make it mandatory that students who aspire for doctoral work must attend to the studies done in India in the textbooks these studies hardly get any attention they are not included so the research which is being done has a very short life it has life which begins with the research and ends when the research is completed it has no place in the academic curriculum it is a very sad situation the teachers and researchers need to think about using these inputs in teaching programs in writing textbooks and seeing their implication sincerely I think teaching and research are interrelated what I find is that the two functions separately our research has no reflection in teaching and teaching has no reflection in research these are two different things what we teach and the topics that we take up for research they become quite independent that is not the situation in United States of America or in other developed countries the research they do is intimately related to the culture and it is integrated in the teaching material I think we need to think about it very seriously only then a qualitative change can be brought in thank you Professor Singh you have stayed and worked for long in Southeast Asia written about the state of psychology in Southeast Asia how do you compare contributions by Indian authors to that of other Asian contributors and if you can further extend it to the contributions from the western world also an important issue that publications from the western countries when we look at them we find that they have a good number of authors for a work in the publications from India you rarely find more than two authors so can you elaborate on the dynamics of this collaborative research thank you Dr. Buraj Bhushan I think my two colleagues here who have been editing journals for so many years I have given you regions about what is this in a year in India so first in brief I would like to talk from Indian scene and then compare with international scene earlier we discussed about quality of our PhD program now one of the regions for poor quality of our that most professors do not have a research program if the professor himself is having a research program which is being extended developed by their graduate students then the outcome would be something of high quality so in my opinion this is the one region because my experience as a graduate student in 70s and after subsequent visit to other universities I found that all those professors who are famous and productive they have a research program in which there will be high 10-20 PhD students working and extending that paradigm we lack that so this is the one region I think another thing I to say that we have poor quality submissions to our journal would be to stress the obvious sorry but I would like to give you the region why this is happening one I said like a doctoral program is problematic and anywhere in the world journals are thriving or prospering because there is a tough competition given by the doctoral students in terms of quality of submissions and getting the space in the journal because they have a long careers to go they want to make a mark they want a job so the same thing has to be cultivated here that unless you do we cannot but here is some dilemma most institutions have now ranking of journals in which international journals would get carry greater weight than the national journals now if this is so why would anyone who has any quality journal manuscript would give to the Indian journal if it can be exported they would like to export it so that leaves us with those manuscripts which cannot really be exported so here is a problem again I agree with both of my colleagues here that even though we have a poor quality journal article it does not mean that the research was really bad what is required that when we send to the reviewer reviewer should at least read and see what the author wanted to do to what extent he or she has been able to formulate the hypothesis and translate into rigorous methodological tests are the data analyzed what contribution the article is making and can the article be improved and how instead of a balanced review like this what we get would be oh I like this article they wanted to do it and I am happy to support it now think of a editor is like a judge in which we are having a trial and the reviewers are like advocates they have to make a case now if they write a review like this what the editor can do because there is no input for the editor so either he or she has to read the entire article and then decide what to do now in this context you said international so I would like to give you an example when I come across a reviewer like this in future I never send any manuscript to that person and in fact in my editorial later I write to the author that I sent to this reviewer he has not done good work and in my opinion you should be doing things like this now two examples I would give you one in child development in 88 another in organizational behavior human decision process I think in 96 reviewers they are being harsh with me and editors wrote to me don't do what this reviewer is doing we need our editors two of them are here sometime to take a position to give justice to the author you have to disagree with the reviewer you have consulted them he is not God but unfortunately even on international scenario now editors are very much afraid of reviewer they are going by the tick mark rather than seeing how the manuscript even though we are getting poor quality still there is some merit it can be strengthened we can make the author realize that these are the weaknesses which the future researchers can improve this is not happening so a professional problem we have here so priority is should I submit to Indian journal or to a foreign journal second priority is are we giving a good feedback now if we are not giving it then we are not making a good investment and frankly I am saying in public now that I grew more from the reviews of my articles than from my training at Purdue University sometime the reviews would be 8 to 10 pages of one article so when the article is 30 pages review would be 10 to 15 pages criticizing telling how it converted and how keep now if there is no programmatic research then you can raise an issue but you cannot answer it so if we have a series of experiments 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 then you are able to give a definitive answer to the question as professor misra also made and that is the reason you see most of the international articles in which you have multiple authors more than 6, 7 there are a series of experiments conducted at different laboratory, different culture different places so that what the position we are taking is very definitive type so this collaboration also helps it is also possible in this country that the same experiment we conduct in Delhi we conduct in Chennai, we conduct in Pandocherry, we conduct in Sri Lanka do we get the similar kind of finding or if we make a change is the process replicable we can also come up with it but somehow this is not happening and that culture has to be built in this country now let us come back to international scenario now institutions all over the world are giving top importance to a scholarship when people are being hired as assistant professor a point which we also agreed yesterday they are given 6 years period in which they have to distinguish themselves as a teacher and a researcher if they demonstrate it then they get promoted as associate professor with tenure if they are not able to do then we extend for one year and two and say that you look for somewhere else now here we don't have that demand either if we demand like this then apparently people would like to do another thing which I now I am almost having in this country for 3 years inspiring teachers or professors may be also an issue research there is no one on this earth whose article is not rejected if an article is rejected it does not mean that it is a poor piece of research all it means that there are not 2 or 3 reviewers whose imagination your article can catch and I have many examples like this how many times the manuscript cross Atlantic from one journal to another journal in one journal they would find everyone would find trash in another everyone would admire the work it gets published it gets cited so this kind of persistence we are not giving the culture here okay so once we complained about the reviewers the truth is sometime when the reviewers have done a thorough job authors are not willing to revise it they say either I have no competence or I have no time and that I whether it is a PhD dissertation or whether it is a journal article if somebody is telling you that you have some major strength in this paper actually you should take advantage of it that negative attitude is also a problem here this you would not find in international everyone is revising improving and that is why the quality is higher so these are the contrasts I am noticing here the journal which I am we have management review it is brought out by Elsevier and in 3 years now our impact value is 0.4 so we have made some progress and same thing has to be done in the psychology department okay now let's suppose when I write a research piece whether it is edited volume or a research article or a textbook or a doctoral dissertation if somebody is able to bring a new perspective on it we should actually feel grateful to that person who has brought it and willingly revise and see whether it makes sense or not in many cases suggestions would be irrelevant ones you can always say that these are the things which are not possible I do not agree most editors want that okay you revise your paper and things you don't do please write a letter so that I can decide it we have that option but here simply saying I have no time or I will consider later on that's not the right kind of attitude for a researcher we have to have a desire and willingness to change and improve our work because it is going to be part of the literature and in my life at least my professor told me don't put anything in print until you are double seared that everything is accurate here people want to publish first whether it is accurate or not that is the problem another important issue especially concerning the researchers is the IRB approval and especially those who are attempting to publish abroad they will always have certain issues that has to do with IRB approval compared to all three of you I have a very small experience in the area but I feel that as a doc reviewer I find that the other reviewer has not raised any issue regarding the IRB approval if the paper comes from the west but as an author I find that always there is some clarification needed about the IRB approval so I think it is also time for the researchers to be acquainted about the IRB issue I will ask professor Ramadhar Singh to elaborate on this IRB means institutional review board because of the human rights and so many legal complications now we have to protect the interest of the researcher participants and the institution where the study is being conducted if you notice the change earlier we used to say subjects now we are not saying human being such subjects we say participants freedom and dignity part so this idea of IRB or institutional review board it consists of some layers some ordinary people some from your field some from outsider complete layman and when we propose any research how you would conduct it how you would recruit the participants how you would terminate your experiment what kind of benefits you give to the participants we describe everything and once we describe then it goes to the review board and then they decide whether this study should be allowed to be conducted here or not if they approve it they can collect data not only this in some of the American schools you have to pass one online test if you pass that test only then you are allowed to collect data from human beings all these would be required by the IRB now journal people if they publish something controversial they are also likely to be sued so they require that your study must have been cleared by the IRB so in online submission you would see there would be a last tick mark that this research was conducted according to the ethical standards of APA or British psychological society or national academy of psychology there has to be if you do not make the tick mark your manuscript would not be considered sometime in the spite of that they later say can you show me, send me this kind copy of the approval later from the IRB if they suspect that it has not been cleared so these are the requirements and we also need to do the same thing this is applicable not only to psychology, medical research anywhere human subjects are being used we have to have approval another interesting thing I wanted to ask you it was basically when I saw publication most underappreciated 50 prominent social psychologists and I find a chapter from you there my idea was that see this could be a fantastic way of putting forward research which somebody considers that deserved much more attention compared to those work which did get that attention and this could be interesting way of presenting the facts another interesting observation I had was at one of the events at Wurzburg University in the discussion issue came that they have come forward with journal some European publisher where you report those studies where you found that the all those quantitative figures did not report significant findings so largely because you report significant findings so here you have an outlet for studies which were fantastically done but the results were not found to be significant and I found these two things very interesting so I would like you to comment on that Prof. Ramathansi you know the your first point was about the most underappreciated now that piece has a big history the first experiment was conducted in 1975 in the psychology laboratory of IIT Kanpur and we 4, 5 experiments we did and then added I think 3 or more experiments at IIM Amdabad and I thought that was the best piece I have written and it should go to Journal of Experimental Psychology General and we had a very simple idea you know like the usual idea was that if you give two things then how do people integrate it and the method was that ok so give two things and then also give one of the things one of the two so how people respond to the one should be the basis of judging how they dealt with the two we reverse the process we said that if you give two things which are necessary to make the judgment and then you give one of the two then what would happen now two things are necessary but you are giving one would your participant or any decision maker act on the basis of only given one our point was that no from the given they infer the missing one and we developed a method by which we can tell that if you say motivation and ability or if you say generosity into income and they are giving gift how would people deal with one so our approach was to show that first deal with tell how the two were attended to and then we can tell how he handled the that was the piece and I thought it was very ingenious one and since then Anderson approached me that you give me to my contributions to information integration theory so it did not get as much attention as it is but many colleagues had made such mistake like this and that's why that Ohio State professor brought out this book that most underappreciated the author thought it is very important but the professional world did not receive that way so he thought that those works must get attention of the graduate students that's why we all were required to write that research 2000 words and I did it now come to the non-significant one earlier this is the way Newman Pearson's approach to psychology became where we were trained only to look at significant differences but now the situation has changed data analysis as professor Misra also the advances we have in data analysis that even non-significant effects are interpretable and this is what I discussed in my precedential address how to interpret non-significant effects or null effects it is possible to interpret it so we should not be surprising in the second panel discussion you heard the editors talking about trend issues and concerns that one should be aware of the issue of ethical clearance reporting of non-significant findings and other relevant issues were also discussed I am confident that the views discussed in the two panel discussions must have help to you position psychology in India as well as globally in different perspectives my sincere thanks to all of you and of course the eminent panelists thank you