Recently, David Edelstein and Jim Goldgeier circulated an open letter for signature to address bullying in the profession. The open letter can be found here. So far, there are nearly 100 signatures, including mine. As a sophomore in high school, I was 5’2”,...
It's happened to all of us (or least those of us who do quantitative work). You get back a manuscript from a journal and it's an R&R. Your excitement quickly fades when you start reading the...
The boon and bane of our academic enterprise is that we get feedback all the time on our work. Our work is better for it--that the hack-iest stuff I read is always stuff that is not submitted to...
As our august leader here at the Duck is putting on his editorial robes, I thought a bit of fresh perspective on the review process is in order. A fun take on the review process!
Apropos Brian's justified rant against peer-review practices in our field, I thought I'd remind readers (or let new ones know) that the pathetic state of the peer-review system in political science is something of a running theme at the Duck of Minerva.Samples include: Brian's call to "read more and write less," a note on the impact of one-strike rules given the stochastic quality of peer review, Laura's discussion of anonymity, PTJ's thoughtful thoughts on the subject, Bill Petti's sharing of a Hitler peer-review video, my call to refuse to review for journals that don't send decision...
Everyone gets rejected. And it never stops being painful not matter how successful or how long you have been in the business. Some of this is inevitable; not everyone is above average. But some of it isn’t. I thought that I would offer some ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ for reviewers out there to improve the process and save some hurt feelings, when possible. Some are drawn from personal experience; others, more vicariously. I have done some of the “don’ts” myself, but I feel bad about it. Learn from my mistakes. First, and I can’t stress this enough, READ THE F*CKING PAPER. It is considered impolite...
In addition to filling an open faculty line in international relations (IR), I was hired in 1991 by the University of Louisville with the idea that I would eventually direct the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The World Order award was then one of four Grawemeyer Awards and at the time I was hired, I knew virtually nothing about any of them. The prize was worth $150,000, making it the largest award in Political Science. Nonetheless, it was not especially well-known even within the discipline, nor much publicized outside of it, though the earliest prizes were awarded to...
Friends, Unfortunately I recently received this rejection letter from Political Science Job Rumors for my recent post, Stuff Political Scientists Like #5. Apparently they do not actually like this. I thought I would share it with you.BCRDear Professor Rathbun,We are writing to inform you that unfortunately we cannot recommend your recent submission on the Duck of Minerva, "Stuff Political Scientists Like #5: a Large-N, for cross-listing on our website. While some of the reviewers found positive things to say about the piece, the overwhelmingly negative nature of the other reviews means that...
I'm currently working on a few difference pieces that deal with the relationship between liberalism and empire. I also, as long-team readers of the Duck know, consider neoconservative understandings of international politics as a variant of liberalism that constitutes a specific flavor of the US commitment to democratic enlargement as transformative of international politics. Neoconservatives reject the idea that international institutions, at least as currently configured, and US self-restraint pacify global politics; their liberalism is strongly inflected by particular currents of American...
I thought I would offer my take on the series of posts below on how to reform the peer-review system. Part of the problem is bad reviews. We can remove the anonymity of them, but that raises the obvious problems (bad blood, retaliation, pulling punches, speaking truth to power, etc). A better solution would be to rely on the expertise of editors. A really stupid review is obvious to even non-experts. And if one reviewer says X and the other says 'opposite of X', then you should know that you have to get a third opinion, not just reject the piece for not garnering sufficient support from the...
Somehow I managed to delete my mediocre post on peer review. The gist: peer review is arbitrary and capricious; summary rejections offer a cosmetic fix; we need to reduce our reliance on counting peer-review journal articles as a basis for evaluating scholarly worth.Jarrod Hayes commented: I am struck by the arbitrariness of peer-review. I have at least once asked to come in as a reviewer when two reviews reached polar opposite conclusions about a manuscript. Both reviews were careful and conscientious, and I found merit in both when I saw them in the decision letter to the author. How could...
I realize that this is not the Feminist IR 101 post that you may have been expecting, or some bright engagement with what's going on in that area we seem to be able to so easily group as "the Middle East ..." but it is something that I've been thinking about recently, so ...In theory, journal review is double-blind: the reviewers shouldn't know who the author is, and the author shouldn't know who the reviewers are. In practice, this almost never works, and seems like a dying standard anyway. That said, for the purposes of this rant, take it as a given: reviews should be, and often are,...