publishing habits

["Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

Intuition-based guessing can't tell us what faculty publishing habits are
like and what percentage will be in ISI-indexed journals.  It is
remarkable, indeed, that universities do so bad a job of finding out what
it is their faculty publish and have so little data in hand at exactly
moments like the present OA conversations.

The wild card is the fields where non-journal and non-refereed publication
take up a lot of product.  I don't know the engineering world well enough,
but conference papers are a regular high-prestige form of publication
there, and those won't show up in journals databases.

The more senior you are in humanities fields, which I do know something
about, the less often you submit to peer-reviewed journals because you're
either writing books or writing articles on commission and at request. I'm
slightly odd for having been administratively involved for the last nine
of my thirty years on the job, but I list 38 articles on my c.v., which
break down this way:

	years 1-10, 12 items
		one still listed as forthcoming, invited for encyclopedia
		11 apparently peer-reviewed journals
	years 11-20, 10 items, 3 peer-reviewed journals
	years 21-present, 14 items, 2 in peer-reviewed journals

Of the 16 items in peer-reviewed journals, five were actually put-up jobs
in one way or another (invited to give a lecture with assured publication
to follow).  There's a lot of other publishing on my c.v., including half
a dozen books, but ISI won't find any of it.  At this point, all my
incentives are for either book publishing or for articles that have been
invited for a particular setting:  in the right setting, inter alia, such
an article has far more impact than an article in a journal.  (One
example:  asked to write first essay for *The Cambridge Companion to
Augustine*.  It got strenuous editing, it contains serious fresh work, but
ISI won't find it.)

To verify this, I looked around and found a leading classics department
that has full c.v.'s posted and find there (among successful people -- the
particular department has a couple of less successful folk I didn't look
for):

	department chair, 23 articles since 1978.  First ten years,
		7 peer-reviewed journal articles, four from top tier
		ISI-for-sure journals.  Since then, none that I can see.
	less distinguished colleague:  20 articles, three peer-reviewed
	very distinguished colleague:  25 articles, 80% peer-reviewed,
		five of them *after* serving as president of our
		learned society when he assuredly has other outlets

If this means anything, it's that (1) practices vary by field, (2) there's
no way of *predicting* how much of a university's product will be in
particular kinds of journals, and (3) we could certainly do a much better
of job of collecting and analyzing such data.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown University