A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
Articles by authors with foreign-sounding names are cited far less than those written by people with “typically-American” names.
I excitedly read this recent tweet by Evan Perkoski of UConn, about a new article he co-authored that has been accepted in International Organization. Beyond being glad for a colleague's success, I...
The twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has come and gone. We've reflected on what led to the attacks, its human toll, how well America handled it, and what impacts the US response has had on...
Simple steps to promote qualitative research in journals It happened again. After months of waiting, you finally got that "Decision" email: Rejection. That's not so bad, it happens to everyone. But it's the nature of the rejection that gets to you. The reviewers (you assume fellow quals) didn't engage with your careful use of process tracing, your intricate case selection method. They just questioned your findings, pointed out your imperfect data, and chided you for leaving out irrelevant historical details. Basically, the reviewer refused to engage with the qualitative methods that are...
This is a guest post by Krista Wiegand, Director of the Global Security Program at the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee. She is co-Editor-in-Chief of International Studies Quarterly. I was once asked on a job interview by a non-IR political scientist why I hadn’t published in the “big 3” journals – American Political Science Review (APSR), American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), and Journal of Politics (JOP). My response was that I had published in top IR journals where my IR colleagues read my work. I...
It's happened to all of us. You get that email "Decision on Manuscript...," open it with a bit of trepidation, just to find a (hopefully) politely worded rejection from the editor. Sometimes this is justified. Other times, however, the rejection is due to the legendary "Reviewer #2," a cranky, ill-informed, hastily written rant against your paper that is not at all fair. The details can vary--they don't like your theoretical approach, don't understand the methods, are annoyed you didn't cite them--but the result is the same: thanks to a random draw from the editor's reviewers list you've got...
Josh asked me if I would write a series of posts at the Duck of Minerva reflecting on my time editing International Studies Quarterly (ISQ). I agreed. This post is less a reflection that some background and caveats. I figure that by collecting them in a single post, I won't have to junk up subsequent entires in this series. I'll just refer back to what I've written here. Background. I formally edited ISQ from 2014-2018, although my team started to handle new manuscripts in October of 2013. I headed up a very large team. At peak, it included as many as fourteen academic editors and two...
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 comments. One reviewer gives a grocery list of additional tests they'd like to see: alternate control variables, different estimators, excluded observations. Another complains about the long list of robustness checks already in the manuscript, as it obscures the important findings. Sometimes both of these reviewers are the same person. And it gets even more complicated if the article ends up rejected...
by Steve Saideman Put "do not cite, do not circulate" on your paper. I received a paper for the upcoming ISA which had that instruction on it. I yelled at (ok, I mocked) my students last week for doing the same thing. In the olden days, folks would put "do not cite" on their papers because they wanted to polish them before submitting, that they didn't want to have errant results widely circulated. Perhaps there is a fear that if a paper is circulated, it might get scooped. But NO!!!! While citation counts are problematic for a variety of reasons (including...
The following is a guest post by Andrew Owsiak, Associate Professor at the University of Georgia and Book Editor for International Studies Review. The race to push scholarly research into the world carries a few consequences, perhaps the most notable being that it proves challenging to stay up-to-date with what is published. To help with this, some journals, for example International Studies Review[1], publish reviews of recently released, scholarly books. These reviews offer great sources of information--to those wishing to remain abreast of current trends, seeking to incorporate relevant...
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 any kind of refereeing process and relies instead on editors who seem to be blind to the hack-ness. The bane is that, well, rejection and criticism can not only delay publication but also hurt feelings. When well done, reviews further the enterprise. However, sometimes, reviews seem to make the authors dance in relatively unproductive ways. There have been lots of tweets and posts complaining...