Fast-Food Scholarship
As a long-time editor of a scholarly journal, I review a substantial amount of new scholarship in my field, almost daily. While many academics in the humanities and social sciences are still producing substantive, rigorous, high-quality scholarship, I have noticed a growing trend that disturbs me and others devoted to rigorous research: Too many academics—veterans and neophytes alike—are producing scholarship that appears to have traded careful, methodical, fully developed intellectual work for quick and dirty publication.
I have come to think of such half-baked work as “fast-food scholarship.” It’s characterized by several factors:
Minimal, selective citation. As an editor and manuscript reviewer for several journals and university presses, I have reviewed innumerable submissions that contain few citations—even though the areas in question have a rich body of published scholarship. These authors mention only one or two works that support (or disagree with) the premise of their article, while ignoring a large and complex corpus of literature on the subject. They cite works to further their thesis, but the ones they choose are often less influential than other citations that could have been included.
Here’s an example: I recently reviewed a submitted manuscript on a specialized subject. The manuscript cited a few articles from a special issue that my journal had published more than a decade ago, but completely ignored what had been published on the topic since then. The more-recent work had transformed knowledge in the area, making an argument based on the 11-year-old work seem shallow.
Clearly, the author had gotten his original idea for his manuscript from our special issue, but he had failed to engage in the hard labor of accounting for the full range of scholarship on the topic. I returned the manuscript to the author and suggested that he update the scholarship on which his argument was based, citing three examples of important titles he should consult. Two months later he sent me a slightly revised manuscript with those three titles added to the citation list—and no more.
While I cannot know another person’s motives, I am tempted to assume that this author chose not to do the truly difficult intellectual work of reconsidering his argument in light of recent scholarship. Instead he invested a minimal amount of effort in order to try to rush yet another article into print.