We law professors often complain about law review editors -- and for good reason -- so it can be informative to see the problems that scholars encounter in other fields, especially when dealing with peer review. In my occasional forays into sociology, I have come across the perceptive work the University of Maryland's Philip Cohen, who writes the Family Inequality blog.
Cohen's latest post, Perspective on Sociology's Academic Hierarchy will be of interest to anyone who has ever been concerned about the relationship between status and publication in academics. Here is a taste:
Not only is it rare, but publication in [American Sociological Review] is highly concentrated in high-status departments (and individuals). While many departments have no faculty that have published in ASR (I didn’t count these, but there are a lot), some departments are brimming with them. In my own, second-tier department, I count 16 out of 27 faculty with publications in ASR (59%), while at a top-tier, article-oriented department such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where I used to work), 19 of the 25 regular faculty, or 76%, have published in ASR (many of them multiple times).
*** I should be clear that I don’t think publication in high-status journals is a good way to identify and reward scholarly accomplishment and productivity. The reviews and publication decisions are too uneven (although obviously not completely uncorrelated with quality), and the limit on articles published is completely arbitrary in an era in which the print journal and its cost-determined page-limit is simply ridiculous.
We have a system that is hierarchical, exclusive, and often arbitrary — and the rewards it doles out are both large and highly concentrated.
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