Publish or be damned I

There’s some part of a student’s mind that’s always conscious of assessments – it’s all very well learning about all of this stuff, but what will I need to do to get a BN or AP? The equivalent for most academics is publishing. In theory, we do what we do because we love it (and we – mostly – genuinely do). But the wider community, and sometimes our own institutions, judge us by the quantity (and sometimes the quality) of what we publish. As a result, there’s some part of my mind that’s always chewing over the question of what I’ll publish next and tracking the glacial progress of my publications-in-progress. That means that when someone asks me what’s going on for me at work, I rarely talk about teaching (although that’s what takes up most of my time and generates most of my joy), but instead about what publications I’m working on.

Despite its huge importance for anyone working in academia, this is a world hidden from most students (and invisible to anyone not inside a university). So, what I’m aiming to do here and in the next entry is to tell you a bit about it and how it works, partly because it might be of interest – but also because it matters that you know what you’re looking at whenever you have an academic text in your hands.

The first question – especially from my parents – is always the same. How much will I get paid for this publication? The answer is (with rare exceptions) also always the same: nothing at all. Very, very few academic books are read in big enough numbers to generate any income at all, and most academic publishers don’t really make much money. Partly as a result, academic books cost a lot of money to buy (my monograph costs €175...), which of course drives circulation down even further. Most of the things I spend so much time thinking about and working on will only be bought by university libraries – but of course I hope that that will lead to lots of people reading them. We publish because we have to publish (which is a sad state of affairs), but also because that’s how people who love books talk to one another: we have a long slow public conversation through published texts.

A second question – unasked because the nuanced differences between them are significant only to a few people – is what type of publication I’m working on. There are, in fact, lots of different types of publication, which have different statuses in the academic world, but there are three forms that most of your lecturers will be focused on. Most highly regarded are monographs: books written by a single person which provide a thorough investigation into a topic. Editions of primary texts (with or without translations) are sort of a form of monograph: for medievalists in particular, the introduction to the text is usually at least as significant a work of scholarship as the editing itself. Next in the pecking order come journal articles: essays that analyse a specific question and present a detailed argument on it. An essay in a highly regarded journal is pretty much as serious an achievement as a monograph – it’s often regarded as a semi-definitive statement on a topic; one in a “lower-ranked” journal is “just” a contribution to a wider debate. And, while I often find them most useful and interesting, third (but quite a low third – more of a wooden spoon than a bronze medal position) in the view of most academics are chapters in an edited volume – that is, a book brought together on a single theme for which different people write chapters.

Next time, I’ll tell you a bit more about the – often unbelievably slow and frustrating – process of producing something for publication.