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SBE 2020: Submission Detail
| ID Number: |
267 |
| Title: |
Understanding the Drivers and Dangers of Academic Status Seeking: Studying the Impacts of Embedded Disciplinary Cultures in a Networked Academy |
| Lead Author: |
Harley, Diane |
| Abstract: |
The Academy should be alarmed about the growing reliance on the perceived prestige value of journals and university presses as default promotion criteria. This concern is urgent given the trickle down of tenure and promotion requirements from elite research universities to less competitive institutions, and the resulting arms race in scholarly publishing. While the entrenched system of peer review provides a quality filter for busy faculty, the inflationary currency in scholarly publishing is over-burdening faculty referees. Faculty, paid by university salaries, provide their reviews to publishers for free while some publishers continue increasing university subscriptions. The academy needs empirical studies of the entire system of academic reputation and status seeking, where growing challenges to institutional review include assessing interdisciplinary scholarship, new hybrid disciplines, and the rise of heavily computational sub-branches of disciplines. A research agenda that emphasizes data gathering and analyses of peer-review practices in academic promotion and publishing, the use of bibliometrics in promotion and university rankings, and the effectiveness of emergent publishing models, should transect epistemologies of sociology (network analyses, organizational behavior), economics (cost/benefit studies, rational choice theories), psychology, anthropology (ethnographies), political science ( power dynamics, international relations), information science (bibliometrics), statistics, and media studies (media ecologies). |
| PDF: |
Harley_Diane_267.pdf |
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