Scholarship, Money, and Prose. Michael Chibnik
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by the unparalleled opportunity that the editorship would give me to learn about what was happening in anthropology and to influence the content of a celebrated journal.
Taking on the editorship fit well into my future work plans. I would not have wanted to edit the journal earlier in my career. Since I had begun teaching three decades ago, I had been busy with classes, fieldwork, writing, and departmental administrative duties. But I had just published my third single-authored book and had no immediate plans to begin a writing project of similar scope. In addition, starting with academic year 2011–2012, I would be teaching only during the fall semester. Because I had grown tired of university politics and teaching large courses, I had reached an agreement with administrators to teach half-time the next four years and then retire. I would have plenty of time to devote to AA.
I had to think hard, however, about whether I was a good fit for the position. My editorial and administrative experience would likely be attractive to the search committee. I was the editor of the Anthropology of Work Review, a small AAA-sponsored journal, and a member of the editorial board of the University of Iowa Press. In the past, I had edited a book on anthropological studies of U.S. agriculture and had been one of the book review editors for American Ethnologist, a prominent AAA journal. I was the chair of the AAA Labor Relations Committee and had served on the advisory panel for Cultural Anthropology of the National Science Foundation and the boards of directors of the Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Work. At Iowa, I had twice chaired the Department of Anthropology and had cochaired the Latin American Studies Program.
Aside from my paper qualifications, I was confident in my ability to oversee the assessment of potential research articles, an important task of the AA editor. I was interested in diverse aspects of our eclectic field and enjoyed reading and commenting on the many manuscripts that had been sent to me for review. It was not difficult for me to summarize the main points of these manuscripts and to present what I saw as their strengths and weaknesses.
I was particularly encouraged by a 2011 from-the-editor essay that Tom Boellstorff had written, entitled “An Open Letter to the Search Committee: Three Tips for Choosing the New Editor of American Anthropologist.” Tip 1 was called “Bread and Butter over Bells and Whistles.” Because this essay was influential in my decision to apply for the editorship, I quote from it here at some length:
One of the most overhyped (if understandably attractive) questions to pose to potential editors runs along the lines of “what new things would you do with the journal?” Not just for candidate editors, but for those who have run journals for some time, there is often pressure from publishers and readers to innovate, not to mention one’s own desire to try something novel…. However, one of the phrases that has formed in my mind as editor-in-chief is … “everyone wants to talk about bells and whistles; no one wants to talk about bread and butter.” What I mean by “bread and butter” is the everyday work of making sure manuscripts are reviewed in a timely manner, overseeing production, managing budgets, and workflow, collaborating with one’s editorial board and staff, and communicating with other editors and representatives of the American Anthropological Association. These and other ostensibly mundane tasks are the heart and soul of AA and every other journal; no special issue or new online feature could exist if this regular work failed to take place…. What this means for the search committee is that I strongly urge prioritizing candidates who do not justify their candidacy solely (or even primarily) in terms of “new directions” in which they might take the journal. Look instead for evidence of timeliness, strong organizational skills, and an ability to manage a heavy workflow without resorting to complaints and excuses. Personally, for instance, I would hesitate to hire a candidate who does not respond to emails swiftly. (Boellstorff 2011a:1)
If this was what was needed for the job, I was well qualified. Although I did not have many novel ideas about how to change the journal, I have an excess of the bread-and-butter skills Tom described. Some of these characteristics shade into compulsions that my friends have been known to make fun of. I almost always respond immediately to emails, meet deadlines, and plan my work schedule in detail. My enjoyment of problem solving and numerical data is reflected in a double major as an undergraduate in mathematics and anthropology and a lifelong love of games, crossword puzzles, almanacs, atlases, and baseball statistics. I too often respond to casual assertions about matters of fact by presenting detailed tables filled with quantitative information.
Other aspects of my temperament, however, are less suited for an administrative position. I have almost no tolerance for the platitudes and strategic maneuvers of bureaucrats and am sometimes unable to keep my mouth shut in circumstances where silence would be prudent. At meetings of department chairs, I would irritate deans by asking impolitic questions when they floated ideas about saving time by grading only portions of assignments, talked vaguely about “excellence,” and schemed ineffectively to game the annual ranking of universities by U.S. News and World Report. I once responded to a dean’s request to “show leadership” (by giving some faculty large raises and others none) with an email saying that her idea of leadership was my doing what she wanted.
Furthermore, I had strong views about matters directly related to editing an anthropology journal. Over the years, I have seen theoretical approaches such as structuralism, systems ecology, ethnoscience, sociobiology, and postmodernism come and go. I was skeptical about the hype surrounding just about all of these approaches; those who knew me well often commented on my iconoclasm. Could I be fair when an author of a manuscript enthusiastically used a fashionable theory that I was dubious about? I also despised what I regarded as jargon, pretentious language, and obscurantism. Would my obsession with clarity make me overly dismissive of manuscripts with good ideas buried in difficult prose? Would I just plain be too cranky?
After two months of thinking about the pros and cons of the editorship, I decided to apply for the position. I did not see how I could turn down the possibility of being at an epicenter of anthropological scholarship. That November, I was chosen to be the next editor of AA.
Academic Journals
Although book publication is important in some fields in the humanities and social sciences, in most disciplines journal articles are the principal sources of information for scholars wanting to learn about recent and past research in their areas of specialization. The publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals is also essential for researchers hoping to advance their careers in academia. Committees assessing the credentials of job applicants and faculty seeking promotion and tenure place great emphasis on the number and types of articles candidates have published in reputable journals.
The history of academic journals has been traced (Tenopir and King 2014:160) to two seventeenth-century publications: Le Journal des Sçavans (The Journal of Experts)in France and Philosophical Transactions in England. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were perhaps one hundred scholarly journals worldwide; this number had grown to approximately ten thousand by 1900 (Price 1975:164). Although recent estimates of the number of scholarly journals vary widely, one carefully done study (Tenopir and King 2014:167) gives a figure of about seventy thousand in 2010.
Academic journals differ in their intended audience and degree of specialization. A few highly regarded journals such as Science and Nature are multidisciplinary. Widely read journals sponsored by professional associations provide broad coverage of particular disciplines. Examples of such publications include Perspectives on Psychological Science, Political Science Review, Ecology, and PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Society of America. The great majority of academic journals, however, are obscure specialized publications. Only people interested in a particular topic are likely to look at or subscribe to journals such as Minnesota History, the Journal of Cellular Plastics, and New Nietzsche Studies.
Scholars have long thought of some journals as being more prestigious than others. Flagship journals of professional associations with many readers are almost always ranked higher than specialized or regional journals with lower circulations. Quantitative measures have recently been developed to measure the “impact” and ranking of journals. The most influential of these measures examine the extent to which articles in a journal are cited in the professional