Och apropå min parafras på Rule 34: If it exists, there’s a journal article about it: Just nu är jag involverad i flera kollektiva publiceringsprojekt i olika faser. Därför skulle jag vilja ha fatt på lite best practices: Hur får man en grupp forskare att dansa i takt med en gemensam publikation som mål? Hur maximerar man meritvärdet av sin insats som redaktör för en volym eller ett special issue? Givetvis finns det forskningsartiklar om det — ja, till och med en hel tidskrift: Journal of Scholarly Publishing.
Här några exempel:
- Cary J. Nederman: “Herding Cats: The View from the Volume and Series Editor“, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 36:4, 2005, 221-228, doi: 10.3138/jsp.36.4.221
- Thomas & Hrebenar: “Editing Multiauthor Books in Political Science: Plotting Your Way Through an Academic Minefield“, PS: Political Science and Politics, 26:4, 1993, pp. 778-783.
- Louise Edwards “Editing Academic Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Maximizing Impact for Effort“, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 44:1, 2012, 61-74, doi: 10.3138/jsp.44.1.61.
- Bildspelsversionen: “Perils and Pitfalls of Editing Academic Books“
- Jeffrey Ross: “Editing Encyclopedias for Fun and Aggravation“, Publishing Research Quarterly, 25:3, 2009, pp 159-169, doi: 10.1007/s12109-009-9126-y.
Och här en blogg som resonerar kritiskt kring värdet av vad vi på forskarsvengelska kallar editerade volymer.
LSE Impact Blog initierade också nyligen en debatt om huruvida bokkapitel över huvud taget är mödan värda, jämfört med journalartiklar:
- Dorothy Bishop: How to bury your academic writing:
“My own solution would be for editors of such collections to take matters into their own hands, bypass publishers altogether, and produce freely downloadable, web-based copy. But until that happens, my advice to any academic who is tempted to write a chapter for an edited collection is don’t.”
- Kent Anderson: Bury Your Writing — Why Do Academic Book Chapters Fail to Generate Citations? på Scholarly Kitchen, en blogg om forskningspublicering:
“Bishop has raised a very interesting question for book publishers in this era — how and why are you at such a disadvantage in citation systems? Her request for publishers to address these deficiencies is also spot-on. But her diagnosis of the problem comes us short”.
- Pat Thompson: Is writing a book chapter a waste of time?
“book chapters are not (yet) a waste of time although they are to be handled with caution. Invitations to contribute a book chapter to an edited collection must always be scrutinised for their potential benefits such as – use for teaching purposes, influence in a wider field of practice, co-location with key scholars in the area and potential for opening up further opportunities. If these are important to you at this time in your career, then a chapter may well be worth doing.”
- Martin Eve: The undervalued book collection and peer review
“when researching within a sub-field of literature, I often find that edited collections contain much more material of interest. Pieces in these volumes have the freedom to specialise in a way that journal articles in the “top-flight” publications often cannot.”