Comments on: Books, journals and incentive structures

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 21:12:23 +0000

And to take us off on a slightly different tangent, if you are a(n) historian, are you a humanities person or a social science person? I thought my degree was in the humanities, but most of the jobs advertised in the US, especially the West, put us in Social Science. Plus, the Americanists all seem to have to take statistics to graduate, while the pre-modern Europeanists and non-Westernists have to learn languages … I’m so confused!

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 06:22:58 +0000

Anglo-American social scientists believe all sorts of bizarre things about Europe … it never ceases to amaze me how many British and American economists believe that French economists don’t use mathematics. (The opposite is true, btw; French economists are very often graduates of the elite engineering schools and tend to err on the other side).

By: Erik

Erik — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 01:49:35 +0000

I think there is a good bit of truth to this analysis. In parts of Dutch academia there are attempts to change this by making government research funding available only for members of “research schools” and making membership in those research schools contingent on publications in foreign peer-reviewed journals. Clearly they think incentive structure matters.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 22:51:29 +0000

Compulsive tooting of own horn here, but I was musing about academic incentive structures myself a while back ( http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/perma10704a.html ) I don’t quite understand why more normative claims about academic life (why this happens or that doesn’t happen) aren’t referred back to some incredibly tangible and explicit incentive structures. Perhaps partly because those incentive structures are cloaked in mysterious processes of tenure evaluation or peer review and partly because academics like to think they’re above that sort of thing. But incentive as an explanatory logic was ever a way to explain why people do what they do, this is it.

By: Tobias Schwarz

Tobias Schwarz — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 22:41:45 +0000

Eszter, yes, knowing both Germany and the UK, I’m fairly confident to say that the German system is far more hierarchically organised. On the general argument, I think this is an interesting way to look at it. Yet I still belive that language market size is the most important explanatory variable. Where there’s familiarity with publishing in English, journal publications increase, if I’m not mistaken. And I think there’s a reason this is happening in smaller countries rather than in bigger ones. Why risk exposure on the world market if you can live quite happily in your niche market – say Germany, or France, especially if international reputation has usually hardly any tangible effect on researchers incomes over here – certainly in the social sciences.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 22:20:34 +0000

An excellent analysis, though I think cultural norms are also important. Most of the time the two are aligned and it’s hard to tell which is dominant. A closely-related issue is that of specialisation which is strongly favored in the US, to the extent that I’ve been told that, if I were to apply for a US job, it would be good idea to delete many of my publications from my CV. It’s my impression that cultural norms outside the US place a good deal of weight on the idea that academics should have a broad command of their own discipline at least. This requires a lot of reading that does not translate into publications of any kind – it’s not clear whether the norm is effectively reinforced by incentives.

By: eszter

eszter — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 22:12:19 +0000

That’s an interesting approach and does help explain why people in various places would choose to pursue the various types of publications. Here’s a question though: how does a young new scholar get to the point of being invited to publish a paper in the edited volume of a bigshot? How can such a young scholar break into the field in the book-publishing context? I’m not saying that journal publishing is completely meritocratic (for one thing, it seems quite fluky) as I suspect it helps if you’re an old friend of the editor or work in the same department as he/she does vs a young new scholar submitting his or her first piece. That said, the journal process seems to leave a bit more room for random people to get their work out and noticed.