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Engineering Education Research (EER) is an emerging interdisciplinary field (Beddoes, 2014a; Jesiek, Newswander, & Borrego, 2009). Having emerged less than twenty years ago, the field’s boundaries and normativities are still shifting and being formed. Furthermore, EER is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on theories and methods from other fields, including education, psychology, and anthropology, among others (Beddoes, 2014b). These characteristics - the age and interdisciplinary nature of the field - make EER a particularly interesting site for examining a discipline in the making. One process through which the field’s boundaries and normativities are being formed is peer review (Beddoes, 2011). Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is to identify the kinds of scholarship that are readily accepted into the field and the kinds that are not. Examining this boundary work can produce new insights into the social construction of knowledge in EER, as well as in other interdisciplinary fields. As a first step toward the overarching goal, this paper presents preliminary findings that address the question: What differences exist in the experiences, perceptions, and understandings of those who have submitted articles to the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) within the past 5 years? 

Research communities often emphasize theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and topics that appeal to particular subgroups of scholars within the community. Therefore, one of the challenges associated with the peer review process is ensuring that innovative ideas are not rejected simply because they live outside the conventional paradigms of the community. Determining why manuscripts are rejected from premier outlets, which influence the norms of a field, can further our understanding of existing disciplinary boundaries and how to increase the diversity of perspectives and the participation of scholars with views outside the conventional paradigm in the community. However, much of the literature on disciplinary boundaries focuses on the reliability of reviewers themselves and published manuscripts. As such, this paper focuses on the experiences and perspectives of scholars who have submitted to but not published an article in the Journal of Engineering Education through in-depth, qualitative interviews. 

This Work-In-Progress paper highlights the work being done as part of an on-going project to explore the field of Engineering Education Research (EER) through the perspective of the peer review process. The overarching objective of this project is to identify the kinds of scholarship readily accepted into the field of engineering education research through peer review processes, and the kinds that are not. By identifying what approaches, topics, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies are accepted and not accepted through the peer review process, the field can be more open to discussion of the advancement of EER. More broadly, identifying such boundary knowledge can facilitate new understanding of how the social construction of knowledge occurs in interdisciplinary fields beyond engineering education. As a first step toward these larger objectives, we review relevant literature and outline our participants as well as our analytic plan.