Monday, March 28, 2005

AJPS review policies...continued

In a recent post to the on-going PolMeth debate regarding AJPS review policies (see my earlier post), John Aldrich (current president of the MWPSA) adds these points>:

It is indefensible to say that formal models ought not to be reviewed because they cannot produce useful results for political science. The editors (assuming Kim writes for Jan as well), don't make that claim. They make the claim that the recent history of peer reviewers "effectively make it a policy for the journal." I interpret that to mean that peer reviewers have concluded, case by case, that the manuscript they were reviewing was a formal model that did not have results in it worth publishing in a major general journal (a comment I have made on more than one occasion as reviewer). (Apparently, from the e-mail traffic to PolMeth, this is a "policy" with repeated and on going exceptions.)

Clearly the numerous exceptions to this rule that have been published suggest that its not much of an iron-clad rule anyway.

His more important point is this:

At the departmental/collegiate level, we need to stop what is a common strategy of saying to our deans and tenure committees that there are three major general journals and, especially in American and formal, a very, very few specialized journals worth publishing in in the discipline. To be able to say that there are other quality journals, of course, there need to be other quality journals, and that exercise may be underway as I write this.

Here, here. I second this. But I suspect that such institutional changes will be slower than re-weaving the social fabric of Ciudad Juarez. Political scientists are an elitist bunch.

posted by Michelle @ 10:13 AM,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home