By Aaron Gordon
Pacific Standard - March 18, 2014
At one of the first academic conferences I ever attended, I heard an
economist joke that dissertations are only read by three people: the
author, their advisor, and the committee chair. It’s funny in the way
that academic jokes are funny: not actually funny but it gets listeners
to nod along with the central truth. This specific central truth must
resonate with established academics, since I heard versions of this same
joke at nearly every conference I attended thereafter.
Like many jokes, this particular one turns out to be half true. A
burgeoning field of academic study called citation analysis (it’s
exactly what it sounds like) has found that this joke holds true for not
just dissertations, but many academic papers. A study at Indiana
University found that “as
many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their
authors, referees and journal editors.” That same study concluded that
“some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are
never cited.” That is, nine out of 10 academic papers—which both often
take years to research, compile, submit, and get published, and are a
major component by which a scholar’s output is measured—contribute
little to the academic conversation.
Read more....
No comments:
Post a Comment