Friday’s Scholarship About Scholarship
Chris Beneke offers advice to academic book reviewers: Thou Shalt Review Books Responsibly, The Historical Society, July 29, 2011.
Colin Miller asks: Burying the Lead?: Does a C.V. Listing “Lead Article” Status Make You Think More Favorably, Less Favorably, or No Differently About a Person?, PrawfsBlawg, Sept. 2, 2011. The consensus of Prof. Miller and the people who posted comments is unfavorable to the practice. Being the lead article often indicates nothing. And bragging about it seems, well, unseemly.
Bryan A. Garner presents his annual list of law journal bloopers and suggests a reform:
Of all the editorial reforms that a law review might adopt, the most beneficial would be to require line editors to justify their edits with brief notations citing usage guides. This policy would eliminate nearly all edits that introduce errors into manuscripts . . . .
Bryan A. Garner, Reforming the Law Reviews, Stud. Law., May 2011, at 18.
Two scholars analyze the early publishing careers of economists:
Michael J. Hilmer & Chritiana E. Hilmer, Is It Where You Go or Who You Know? On the Relationship Between Students, Ph.D. Program Quality, Dissertation Advisor Prominence, and Early Career Publishing Success, 30 Econ. Educ. Rev. 991 (2011)
Abstract: Previous research finds that both Ph.D. program quality and relative dissertation advisor prominence are positively related to early-career publishing success. We provide insight into the relative importance of those factors by estimating early-career research productivity functions that: (1) allow relative dissertation advisor prominence to vary while holding Ph.D. program quality constant and (2) allow Ph.D. program quality to vary while holding relative dissertation advisor prominence constant. Results for a sample of 2983 economics Ph.D. recipients suggest that: (1) the estimated marginal effects of relative dissertation advisor prominence do not vary systematically within top Ph.D. programs and (2) students graduating from a program-switching advisor”s higher-ranked program publish significantly more than those graduating from his or her lower-ranked program. Combined, these results might suggest that the observed correlation between dissertation advisor prominence and early-career publishing results more from students working with prominent advisors possessing the higher innate potential required to gain admission to top programs rather than strictly because they work with the more prominent advisor.
A professor of creative writing muses about scholars who say they’ve been told that they write too well. What’s really going on? Different possibilities include that the piece is overwritten or it is written well but the analysis or research are inadequate. Rachel Toor, The Problem Is: You Write to Well, Chron. Higher Educ., Sept. 6, 2011.
[I]f someone ever tells you that you write too well, ask him for an explanation and be prepared to hear something that will cause you to do more work.
We welcome suggestions of articles or blog posts to list in Friday’s Scholarship About Scholarship. Send a note to legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com. mw
