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Memoirs of a SLACer

sociological views on life and the liberal arts

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The publication gauntlet

March 11, 2009 by John

There is an interesting post on Inside Higher Ed about Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, which examines peer review panels.  As a graduate student, I’ve been curious about peer review processes in general, as I’ve experienced successes and failures in peer-reviewed publications and grant competitions.

I suspect that little will change in regard to these processes in my future life as a junior faculty member, but I wonder how my choice of institution will affect my desire to run the publication gauntlet.  Coming from a “publish or perish” department, I have a strong desire to get my work published in order to contribute to the body of sociological knowledge.  I also want to publish in well-regarded journals in order to increase the chance that others will actually be aware of my contributions.  At the liberal arts school where I will be employed, however, expectations for publication are much lower than for junior faculty in my current program and the fact that a paper went through peer review is more important than the name on the front of the journal.

Higher expectations for research often come with fewer teaching obligations and graduate student collaborators, allowing faculty to maintain multiple projects and submit a lot of papers for review.  At most liberal arts schools, teaching loads are higher and there are no graduate students with whom to collaborate, which I expect results in fewer concurrent projects and fewer submissions for review.  As a student I have watched papers go through numerous review cycles at multiple journals before receiving an R&R or conditional acceptance.  In one case, this process took years.  A large part of the reason for this was that the authors submitted their paper first to a top generalist journal, then to highly-ranked specialty journal, then to another specialty journal, before being accepted at yet another specialty journal that, while still good, does not have as much cachet as the earlier destinations.

Although I want to publish in highly-ranked journals, I am unlikely to have years to devote to the publication of a single paper as a junior faculty member at a liberal arts school.  In time, I wonder if this desire will fade in favor of running a more forgiving gauntlet that is equally supported by my tenure review committee while fewer outside of my institution are aware of my contributions to sociological knowledge.

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Posted in The Publication Gauntlet | Tagged Academic Publication, Michele Lamont, Peer Review, Publication, Publish or Perish, R1, SLAC | 7 Comments

7 Responses

  1. on May 26, 2009 at 2:02 pm Rankings revisited « Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] I have considered the difficulty of publishing and its effects on tenure, I hadn’t considered that being awarded tenure at a […]


  2. on June 5, 2009 at 7:52 am Maximizing your potential « Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] management and those who became union representatives had higher opinions of the union.  In fact, I’ve thought about this in relation to my own career.  Slate’s summary, however, ignores the idea that working at a […]


  3. on February 1, 2011 at 8:11 pm The publication current « Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] February 1, 2011 by John In my recent (highly scientific) look at ASA submission types, I noted that some of the ASA submissions are papers with promise that could be revised for future submission to a journal.  In that post I stated, “Of these, about half will likely never be submitted because they were written by people, like me, for whom conference presentations count as ‘scholarly activity.’”  This statement, in the second half of my second year, is similar to a concern I raised nearly two years ago when discussing the publication gauntlet: […]


  4. on August 1, 2013 at 11:25 pm Academic phase transition in the liberal arts | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] very quickly, made me think about the experiences of one of my acquaintances from grad school in the publication gauntlet and, to a lesser extent, my own recent […]


  5. on January 26, 2014 at 9:01 pm The reality of writing at teaching-oriented institutions | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] is a problem that I’ve discussed before in terms of academic false consciousness and the publication gauntlet. I am also hurrying to get some writing done before the crush of grading makes it practically […]


  6. on November 17, 2015 at 9:05 pm The broken review system | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] in sociology, sharing the story of a paper that underwent 13 peer reviews over several years in the publication gauntlet. Although the paper’s findings were essentially unchanged by this process, each reviewer […]


  7. on February 18, 2016 at 9:14 pm What counts (and when)? | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] of this makes the publication gauntlet that much more daunting. There is also uncertainty, though, about when one wants things to be […]



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