And it is worth pointing out following Roger's post that these 'rules' are highly discipline specific (and such differences are endorsed by government agencies that review academic performance).  The 'rules' for economics are very different from those for history or for sociology.  The moral then for younger scholars is to make sure you know your own discipline's rules for traditional publications, but this does not preclude the use of internet publication spaces that allow greater freedom. 
 
Mary Morgan
 
Professor Mary S. Morgan
LSE and University of Amsterdam
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/facts/Home.aspx
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http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2009/12/MaryMorganProfessorship.aspx
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/Research/facts/Events.htm>  

________________________________

From: Societies for the History of Economics on behalf of Roger Backhouse
Sent: Wed 10/08/2011 16:14
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Nobel Prizes for Economic Science: Intended and Unintended Consequences


This discussion makes me think of David Colander's article with a title something like "How to survive as an out of sync economist", in a volume edited by Steven Medema and Warren Samuels "How Economists do Economics". His advice is to play by the rules until you get established: then you have freedom to explore things that are unfashionable. In economics, journal articles are, without any doubt, the currency that is valued by recruitment and tenure committees. 

Roger Backhouse


On 10 August 2011 15:35, Ric Holt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


	To respond to Roy and Steve's posts on publishing in edited volumes. In many ways it is similar to publishing in journals. A good editor(s) should always guarantee the rigor and academic quality of the chapters in the volume that is being edited. It is the responsibility of the editor to referee the work and be willing to reject a paper as a chapter if it does meant certain standards. Similar to journals there are good editors and bad. I have published in refereed journals where the feedback and evaluation was poor and in edited volumes where the standards where very high. Also I have been asked to contribute articles to journals and in those cases the standard seems very similar to edited volumes. Finally, what I like about contributing chapters to edited volumes is the academic freedom to explore ideas that  might not be appealing or too cutting edge for journals. For example, I believe, that Richard Easterlin's work on happiness and growth was initially rejected by journals and ended up being published as chapter in an edited volume before his work was recognized. So edited volumes do play an important role in academic discourse. What it really comes down to is having a community of scholars that actually reads someone's work and can make evaluation independently of where it actually shows up at. 
	Ric Holt
	

	On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Medema, Steven <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
	

		Further to Roy's post, a related perspective expressed in an article by Cardoso, Lodewijks, and Medema published in the HOPE volume on The Future of the History of Economics (2002), edited by Roy Weintraub. The position taken there (and repeated almost verbatim in a short paper by Medema was published in a JHET mini-symposium in memoir of Bob Coats in 2009) is that edited volumes reduce the quality of scholarship in the field, as the contributions are not subjected to the refining fires of the refereeing process.  So the effect is not only short run (you substitute articles in inferior outlets for writing articles for refereed journals), but long run (you reduce the odds of your work hitting good journals because you have not been beat over the head by referees forcing you to do good work). This is a point that I also have made on the several occasions when I have been asked to speak to "young scholars" about publishing in the history of economics. (I will also allow that the editors and/or publishers of some volumes do use rigorous refereeing, but this seem to me to be the exception rather than the rule.)

		Of course, I say this having edited a number of such volumes and having contributed to many of them over the years. But this does not obviate the point that, for young scholars in particular, the costs of publishing in such volumes can be substantial unless the author has a relatively full quiver of nice publications in scholarly journals.

		Steve Medema
		University of Colorado Denver
		
		
		





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