linguistics publication and other fields

[Suzanne Kemmer]

It seems to me there is a big difference between
reprinting something (even if almost immediately)
with the permission of both publishers,
and sending a work off to be reviewed by more
than one publication simultaneously.   Although I strongly sympathize with
authors who have their work tied up a long time in review and cannot
do anything else with the work despite uncertain outcome,  the fact is that sending
a single paper simultaneously to more than one publication venue, if allowed,
would instantly gum up the whole system, which is why publishers
and editors hate it (and many scholars who do a lot of reviewing consider it reprehensible). 

Journals also want to establish or maintain their reputations for new 
and cutting edge work by prohibiting prior publication (sometimes even
web publication, as I have seen on the sites of some psych journals). 
Editors of volumes tend to be much less worried about prior publication 
of content and even content+form than journals.
In fact in some fields, notably Psychology,
papers in edited volumes, called "chapters",
are summaries of lines of research published previously as
individual or small sets of experimental studies. And some of these summaries
appear in more than one edited volume. 
In Linguistics a lot of the papers in edited volumes on a single topic
are original, first-time published research. I think linguists suffer
from the view of 'chapters' held by many promotion committee members
outside our field. 

Suzanne


On Mar 29, 2010, at 5:55 PM, Claire Bowern wrote:

> Has anyone used Google Scholar's citations as part of a tenure or
> promotion case? It finds books and book chapters as well as articles
> (though presumably it doesn't have the same official status that some
> of the other indices have).
> 
> Incidentally, to take up another thread of this discussion, peer
> review serves as a small discouragement to double-dipping (i.e.
> submitting the same work for publication twice in different places). I
> can think of a number of book chapters which have appeared unaltered
> in several volumes, either as a subsequent chapter in a
> single-authored book or as a book chapter after appearing in a
> refereed journal. If pages are so scarce and rejection rates so high,
> we shouldn't be wasting pages by having the same work appear more than
> once.
> 
> Claire
>