Publishing Strategies: An Anthropologist’s Perspective

1. Publishing Strategies: An Anthropologist’s Perspective RohanBastin Deputy Head (almost) School of Humanities & Social Sciences

2. Peer Esteem • ERA has created an interesting set of dilemmas for academic publishing: • Journal rankings • Or, I wouldn’t belong to a club… Hang on! It’s all changed! • To confer or not confer… • The slings and arrows of what matters in my field • Textbooks are not the only fruit … • When it comes to books, but some disciplines don’t write books and, therefore, 1 book = 5 articles (DEST).

3. The Strategic Academic • Indeed, one of the outcomes has been the sentiment that one should never put pen to paper unless there is something to be gained from it. • Book reviews • Letters to the editor • Articles in unlisted journals and magazines • Teaching study guides that cannot also be turned into DEST points • RohanBastin in press “The collected shopping lists of RohanBastin: A Semiotic Analysis of Cat Food, Baked Beans and Noodles.” • Sorry, I can’t read anything at the moment. I’m too busy writing. You don’t get any points for reading and it’s not on the workload model.

4. Idealism • My argument is that you must never lose sight of what you understand to be the quality publications, the works that count in your estimation, in your particular field. • These standards derive from the nature of your own work, the works you read, the works that impress you, the domains of scholarly engagement that you think matter. • Peer esteem is precisely about one’s peers.

5. Know Your Product • Earlier this year at a colloquium-preparation training session I lamented that HDR students in the digital age have greater access to multiple sources and consequently become more dependent on key word searches than browsing the contents of journals. • This makes people less familiar with particular journals and less loyal to favourite journals • Opens the way for using seemingly objective quality criteria such as rankings or citation scores • However, those criteria relate directly to peer esteem and the reputation certain journals establish for publishing cutting edge content in a particular field. • Moreover, they can lose or change this reputation according to the vicissitudes of time (changes to editorial personnel, etc.)

6. Take Advice • Nearly all of the established scholars I know in my discipline treat their draft manuscripts as works-in-progress that their friends/colleagues comment on • Comments include suggestions of journals to which the article might be sent. • While it is VERY unusual for anthropologists to co-author with more than one other writer, it is also unusual not to see a list of names in the acknowledgements. • Therefore, put your work out there!

7. What Goes Around Comes Around • Journal editors increasingly struggle to find peer reviewers, especially as: • The number of journals has grown • The pressure to publish has grown • The workload system stresses one’s public output and not one’s private input • The situation is even worse for book reviews (zero DEST points) • Consequently, a journal editorial team will be a lot more receptive to someone who has previously laboured on behalf of that journal • They will also go the extra mile when one’s own books are published and one would like to see them reviewed. • So put your hand up for a book review, don’t say no to an anonymous article review and don’t do it badly or superficially. • This also means that one can have several writing projects on the go at the same time, which is very important given the publication times

8. What kind of Output? • It varies according to discipline but it’s worth noting that the criteria by which one gains academic promotion within an institution do not always match the criteria by which one gets a job at another institution. • Never mind the quality, feel the width! • Anthropologists write books and their worth in the discipline is measured to a great extent by the books they’ve written • They write edited books and usually write chapter-length introductions to those books which may become the main item ever cited because that chapter is a work of scholarship in and of itself • Books can be very slow • They write articles in journals • They also write consultancy reports • They don’t do conference proceedings • They think posters are cute but patronising • They find multi-author scholarship very funny