On annoying editors and reviewers

ON ANNOYING EDITORS AND REVIEWERS

 

David Lester

 

            There are several annoying customs that are present in modern scholarly publishing, and they are especially common in research on suicide: The first is the insistence on a “solid” introduction.

A Solid Introduction!

 

            Editors and reviewers insist on that authors place the research to be reported in a “context.” This results in the first two pages of the article telling us that suicide is a major public health or mental health problem. Suicide rates will be given, suicide will be labelled as a leading cause of death, and well-known “facts” about suicidal behavior presented. Two or more “authorities” will be cited to reassure readers that research on suicide is important and that more research is needed.

 

            Let us be clear on this point. Lay people do not read scholarly journals. Scholars read scholarly journals. We are not writing for Time or The Huffington Post. If readers of the Archives of Suicide Research or Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior do not know that research on suicide is important, then they should be stripped of their graduate degrees. The same is true for readers of psychiatric, psychological and sociological scholarly journals.

 

            In this case, why are we wasting pages of scholarly journals on these unnecessary introductory paragraphs? Editors should let authors simply state at the beginning of their articles:

 

insert standard introductory paragraphs here

 

and then move onto the meaningful introductory comments.

 

            I often had to read articles in law journals for some of the topics I was researching, and I was amazed (and horrified) to find that articles in law journals can run to hundreds of pages. My son has a law degree from Harvard University, and he was visiting when I was signing a brief to be presented to the Supreme Court that was a lengthy document. He skipped through dozens of pages and in 30 seconds had identified the critical two pages that had the essence of the argument. I then realized what he learned in law school: how to skim through the useless pages of documents (and articles) and quickly find the point of the document.

 

            However, what they do not learn in law school is how to write brief articles in the first place!

 

Citing Recent Articles

 

            Admit it, those of you who teach and who use textbooks, that new edition that killed the second-hand book market, did it really have any information that wasn’t in the earlier edition? Of course not! It did have more recent articles cited (to justify the new edition), but the social sciences advance slowly, and the new edition does not have many new research findings, if any. New editions every ten years would suffice, not every three, four, or five years.

 

            The same occurs for scholarly articles. Editors and reviewers insist on citations of recent articles. Why?

 

            I typed suicid* into PsycINFO on February 26, 2015, and obtained 47,960 articles. When I restricted the search to titles, the number of articles was reduced to 25,271 articles. No-one is going to search more than first few pages (each with 10 articles). As a result, young researchers tend to be unacquainted with the research that has been published in the past. They conduct research, therefore, which they think is novel, but which was first carried out 20, 30, or even 60 years ago. When we old folk see their report, we sigh. For us, the wheel has been re-invented yet again. This fetish for citations of recent work does not add to the research report. If the ground-breaking study on the topic was conducted long ago, then citing that study is sufficient.

 

            There is one exception to this. It is allowed to cite Emile Durkheim’s book, but here the citation is usually Durkheim (1951), as if he wrote the book after the Second World War. I have always cited the book as Durkheim (1897) which is when the French edition was first published in Paris by Felix Alcan. One reviewer objected and asked whether I had read that edition. I lied and replied, “Bien sur.” In fact I haven’t read the English translation either, although I did own it!

 

Abstracts

 

            One useful modern trend is the demand that Abstracts be more complete, reporting most of the major statistics and results. Not only is this useful when working on a meta-analysis, but it spares us from reading (downloading or printing) the complete article. In fact, if Abstracts were more complete, about two pages long, we could eliminate the need to publish lengthy articles!