Scholarship, Money, and Prose: Behind the Scenes at an Academic Journal

By Michael Chibnik

An illuminating guide to publishing a scholarly journal written by a former editor-in-chief

American Anthropologist is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, published quarterly, reaching more than 12,000 readers with each issue and representing four distinct subfields. The journal publishes articles that add to, integrate, synthesize, and interpret anthropological knowledge; commentaries and essays on issues of importance to the discipline; and reviews of books, films, sound recordings, and exhibits. From 2012 to 2016, Michael Chibnik was editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist. In Scholarship, Money, and Prose, he writes a candid account of the complex and challenging work entailed in its production.

Providing detailed ethnographic and historical descriptions of the operations of a major journal and behind-the-scenes anecdotes of his experiences, Chibnik makes transparent the work of an editor-in-chief. He reveals how he assembled diverse materials, assessed contradictory peer reviews of manuscripts submitted for publication, and collaborated with authors to improve the legibility and clarity of their articles. He also examines controversies that emerged from his columns on open access and biological anthropology and the inclusion of politically charged material in the journal.

Scholarship, Money, and Prose sheds light on two aspects of successful editing that are common to academic journals whatever their subject matter. The first task is to strike a balance among different theoretical perspectives and topical specialties. This pressure is particularly salient in a field like anthropology in which scholars differ greatly in the extent to which they adopt a scientific or humanistic perspective. Second, editors must attend carefully to the need to keep costs down and revenues up in an economic environment in which libraries are cutting subscriptions and publishers are considering the future sustainability of journals. Relevant to a wide range of disciplines, Scholarship, Money, and Prose serves as a window onto the past, present, and future of scholarly publishing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297072

Book preview

Preface

From 2012 to 2016, I was editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist (AA), a major journal sponsored by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Editing AA was a complicated job that involved working with a large editorial board, six associate editors, a managing editor in California, an editorial assistant at my university in Iowa, and staff at the AAA and our publisher, Wiley-Blackwell. Articles and essays in AA examined an astonishing variety of topics. Issues included research articles, research reports, book reviews, obituaries, interviews, commentaries, vital topics forums, distinguished lectures, and sections on public anthropology, visual anthropology, and world anthropology.

One of my topical specialties is the anthropology of work. Researchers in this field have carried out careful ethnographic studies of farmers, hedge fund traders, truck drivers, geishas, and drug dealers. When I was learning about the complexities of editing AA, I wondered why there was not also an ethnography of the work of academic editors. Their activities, after all, directly affect the careers of anthropologists writing books and articles about other professions. I could not even find a breezy, gossipy memoir about academic publishing similar to those written by editors at popular magazines and commercial presses.

In the 1950s, two editors of AA, Sol Tax and Walter Goldschmidt, wrote numerous short columns for the journal about various aspects of their work. Such essays appeared only sporadically in AA in subsequent years until Tom Boellstorff became editor-in-chief in 2007. Tom wrote a from-the-editor column for every issue about matters related to anthropology and publishing. These essays provided insightful, inside glimpses of a world of editing that most readers of the journal knew little about. Because I enjoyed the columns and thought that they included useful information, I decided to continue them after I took over the editorship of AA.

The from-the-editor columns that Tom and I wrote were the immediate inspiration for this book. Some parts of the book are greatly expanded treatments of ideas that we first explored in our essays. Most of what I say here, however, examines aspects of editing that we never got around to discussing. This book is not intended to be either a definitive study of scholarly editing or a manual of how such editing should be done. Instead, it is a historical and autobiographical account of my experiences and practices at AA. As such, the book is a perhaps unusual hybrid of an ethnography and a memoir that focuses on work. The story I tell must be understood in the context of the particularities of AA and the AAA, the field of anthropology, and my own interests, obsessions, and eccentricities. Although I have done my best to be as straightforward as possible, I realize that many of the events I describe might well be interpreted differently by others. I take some comfort in knowing that such ambiguities characterize all ethnography.

Much of this book is based on articles and essays from AA and Anthropology News (called Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association from 1960 to mid-1974 and Anthropology Newsletter from mid-1974 to mid-1999). In an effort to avoid too much clutter, I have provided in-text citations for information found in these journals only for direct quotes. References to other material from these journals can be found in endnotes. All references to sources other than AA and Anthropology News have intext citations. The bibliography at the end of the book includes both sources cited in the text and sources cited in the endnotes.

Introduction

One day in February 2011, Laura Graham walked into my office and asked if I would be interested in applying for the position of editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist. Laura, a colleague of mine at the University of Iowa, had agreed the previous fall to chair the search committee for the editor of the journal. The term of Tom Boellstorff, the current editor, was to end in the summer of 2012. AA, founded in 1888, is one of the oldest and most influential anthropology journals in the world. It was for many years the only journal published by the American Anthropological Association. Although the AAA now sponsors more than twenty journals, the association calls AA its flagship publication.

Despite the prestige of the AA editorship, the competition for the job might not be all that intense. Of the many talented people who could do the work, few were likely to apply. When I discussed the possibility with other anthropologists, the most common reaction was wonderment that anyone would want to edit the journal. Most regarded the job as a time-consuming, thankless slog likely to involve unpleasant conflicts with disgruntled authors whose manuscripts were turned down. The unsalaried position provided no significant perks other than a reduced teaching load that might be negotiated with the editor’s university. Nevertheless, I was attracted 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 literature. Citations are not the only way in which journals are ranked. Acceptance rates and internet downloads are also commonly regarded as measures of success; the newly developed altmetric score attempts to count how often articles are circulated on social media. The various measures of journal impact and quality result in somewhat different rankings of publications. Moreover, every one of these measures has been criticized on both technical grounds (Craig, Ferguson, and Finch 2014) and as unwelcome indicators of the spread of an audit culture obsessed with evaluating individuals and institutions on the basis of a few ill-thought-out numerical measures (Shore 2008).

The rise of the internet has dramatically reduced the importance of print editions of academic journals. Almost all scholars nowadays search for and read articles online, sometimes printing them out. Libraries often discontinue subscriptions to print editions of journals that are available online. Many journals have abandoned print altogether. The transition to online journals, perhaps surprisingly, has rarely led to subscription costs being less than when they were available only in print (Cope and Kalantzis 2014:23).

Digital publishing has the potential to change the form and content of journals. Authors can now include links in their articles to relevant publications and websites and have online space to include supplementary material, photographic albums, interview transcripts, videos, and complex data sets. Journal editors can use social media and websites to create interactive forums in which readers and authors can exchange comments on the content of articles. Although some journals have taken advantage of these opportunities, most have not. Online editions of journals are often identical to what once appeared in print.

These technological changes have had a significant effect on the timeliness of publication. In many fields, especially in the sciences, scholars have complained that the slowness of journal publication hinders their ability to keep up with recent research findings. The advent of the internet has allowed manuscripts to become available earlier than was possible when journals came out only in print. In the sciences, prepublication drafts of unfinished manuscripts are often made available online. In all fields, early view publication is common, in which readers can see articles as soon as copy editing and typesetting are finished. Journal issues have become less relevant; instead, there are content streams of articles as they become ready for publication.

Increasing costs and the development of the internet have spurred a movement toward open access journals. Advocates of open access oppose the placement of journal articles behind a paywall in which content is available without cost only to those individuals affiliated with institutions with subscriptions. Scholars without such affiliations—many living in poor countries—often cannot afford the costs of seeing articles essential to their research and teaching. With open access, readers everywhere can see online the content of a journal. Librarians are often among the strongest advocates of open access because of their commitment to making research results widely available and their inability to acquire as many journals as they would like. The economics of publishing, however, make a transition to open access difficult for many journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Since the late 1990s, tightening library budgets have led to striking transformations in journal publishing. College and university libraries in the United States and elsewhere have had to deal with an explosion in the number of scholarly books and the rapidly rising costs of science journals published by commercial firms such as Elsevier and Springer. The result has often been reduced purchases of books and the discontinuing of some journal subscriptions. University presses in the United States in the 1990s could count on about 1,500 purchases of their books from libraries; the current figure is between 200 and 500. Subscriptions to academic journals are scrutinized much more carefully than was once the case. The situation worsened during the economic recession beginning in 2007. Many journal subscriptions were cut in subsequent years and not resumed during the slow economic recovery.

Editorial Work

As I settled into my new position, I was struck by the complexity of the work. The enormous literature on scholarly publishing provided only limited help in my struggles to learn what was involved in editing American Anthropologist. Editors have written a lot about topics such as peer review, measures of impact, digital publishing, access, economics, and ways to write publishable articles.¹ But, as Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (2014:37) observe, many aspects of pre-publication processes are hidden in confidential spaces … invisible to public scrutiny. The invisibility alluded to by Cope and Kalantzis refers primarily to day-to-day tasks of academic editing such as soliciting and assessing peer reviews, deciding whether to accept manuscripts submitted for potential publication, and writing decision letters to authors.

Most of what has been written about this kind of work is buried in journals in brief, hard-to-find from-the-editor essays. I have found only two book-length treatments about the daily activities of academic editors. Both were written two decades ago. Stephen McGinty’s Gatekeepers of Knowledge: Journal Editors in the Sciences and Social Sciences (1999) is based for the most part on interviews with editors about diverse topics related to their work. While the interviews are interesting, McGinty does not attempt to provide the thick descriptions characteristic of ethnographic accounts. Furthermore, McGinty’s goal of making generalizations about academic editing leads him to discuss only briefly the operations of many different journals. As a result, readers do not find out much about the intricacies associated with editing any one journal. Andrew Abbott’s Department & Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (1999), in contrast, includes long chapters about editing the American Journal of Sociology. Abbott provides intriguing examples of the ways different editors solicited and reviewed manuscripts and carefully describes their strategies in dealing with controversies concerning the content of the journal. Although Department & Discipline includes a chapter about what Abbott calls the modern form of the American Journal of Sociology, most of the book is about the journal’s history.

American Anthropologist

In some ways, American Anthropologist fits well into conventional classifications of scholarly journals. As is typical of major journals sponsored by professional associations, AA is highly selective, has a large circulation, and is generally regarded as a prestigious venue for publication. AA, however, has two distinctive features. First, the topics and methods in AA articles are exceptionally diverse. Second, the journal is unusually magazinelike with many pages devoted to sections other than research articles.

I have sometimes thought that one could study just about anything and call it anthropology. While this is an exaggeration, the subject matter of anthropology includes an extraordinary range of topics. The subject matter of anthropology and the nomenclature for its subfields differ considerably from country to country. In the United States, anthropology is ordinarily divided into four subfields. These are—in order of the number of practitioners—sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. The inclusion of these quite different subfields in one discipline can be understood to a certain extent by examining what anthropologists were doing when the field became a separate discipline in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists in the United States regarded their general goal as the description of human societies past and present. Their research examined technology, social organization, and ideology in recent times (sociocultural anthropology) and the distant past (archaeology), physical characteristics (biological anthropology), and languages (linguistic anthropology). In what has become a cliché, anthropology came to be described as a holistic discipline that showed relationships among culture, human biology, and language.

From the beginnings of anthropology in the United States, the subjects examined and methods used in studies in the four subfields were so unlike one another that their coexistence in a single discipline must have mystified outside observers. In the first years of the twentieth century, sociocultural anthropologists were interviewing American Indians about their customs, archaeologists were digging up material remains from long ago, biological anthropologists—then called physical anthropologists—were measuring skulls, and linguistic anthropologists were devising ways to describe and analyze unwritten languages. As time passed, the particular topics and methods in each of the subfields changed. Sociocultural anthropologists from the United States now conduct research in all parts of the world, archaeologists examine current material culture as well as remains from the past, biological anthropologists employ sophisticated genetic tools, and linguistic anthropologists focus on relations between language and culture. Nonetheless, the subfields are as separate as ever from one another. This separation is exacerbated by increased professional specialization. In the first part of the twentieth century, some