Why and Where Do Academics Publish?

INTRODUCTION Social and behavioral research is a complex activity that takes place in an ambiguous environment. This environment is more ambiguous than most researchers are aware, and it is changing more rapidly than most researchers realize. In fact, focused on their own activities and struggling with the very unclear messages from their environments, most researchers have very limited perspectives on what has been and is happening. This essay describes some current and important issues that confront social and behavioral researchers1. Although I expose my personal opinions, I do not aim to convince readers that these opinions are necessarily correct. Rather, I hope to stimulate reflection and discussion. The first section of this essay raises issues related to researchers’ motivations. It points out conflicts between doing what is methodologically correct and doing what readers expect. The second section raises issues related to researchers’ abilities to evaluate research. It describes some behaviors of journal editors and reviewers that make evaluation unreliable. The third section looks at evolution in channels for academic publication. The final section presents data that suggest academic administrators – deans and department heads – have been increasing the pressures on professors to publish in prestigious journals and to publish papers that attract many citations. COLLISIONS BETWEEN NORMS An editor asked me to review a paper that investigated correlates of citations to published articles. The paper analyzed the citations of every article – more than 10,000 of them – that had appeared in the most prominent journals in a specific field over several decades. My research has convinced me that editorial reviews are unreliable (Starbuck, 2005), and Bedeian (2008) has reported that many authors say editors compelled them to make statements with which they actually disagreed. Since I have no evidence that my own reviewing is more reliable than that of other reviewers, I have adopted a policy of not making definitive recommendations to editors or authors. I tell authors what I find interesting, unclear, or apparently wrong, but I try not to come across as judgmental or to tell authors what they must do. Thus, my brief review of this paper only stated that the authors had examined interesting issues in reasonable ways. However, I also wrote that the authors should not report indicators of statistical significance in some sections of their paper. The concept of statistical significance deals with inferences about population parameters based on data about a random sample from that population. Key sections of this study 1. I thank Bernard Forgues, Allègre Hadida, and Andrea Mina for useful suggestions that improved this essay.