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!
