Why people ARE reading your think-tank’s latest report

July 6, 2008 | by Richard Gowan | More on Global system, Influence and networks | No comments

In April, I posted about a fine if suitably hard-to-find academic article on why most policy literature goes unread.  Now, a post by Dan Drezner draws my attention to a rather fun piece by Pittsburgh academic Charli Carpenter on what you have to go through to get your musings into a policy journal.  Here’s an edited summary of her lessons for the aspiring academic-wonk:

No Footnotes Required… or Allowed. As a social scientist, this really gave me pause. Particularly when crafting a fairly outside the box argument that is sure to attract criticism, how could I not cite my sources as backup for my claims?

Don’t Bother Acknowledging Your Priors. In scholarly journals one rarely takes sole credit for a piece, since it usually evolves from conversations, peer feedback and the intellectual legacy of earlier scholarship. Policy journals don’t waste space on such niceties.

Editorial License is Par for the Course. I was completely unprepared for the loss of autonomy over one’s work you experience when you attempt to publish inside the beltway. Editors of academic journals offer iterated feed-back, declining to publish until the author produces a text in accordance with their guidelines, and they copy-edit the final draft for typos. Editors of policy journals take the original manuscript and rewrite/restructure/interpolate it to suit their own ideas, then put your byline on it. And, they believe they are doing you a favor by taking on the job of the “heavy lifting” the manuscript from misbegotten draft to masterpiece.

Don’t Expect Time to Reflect. After all the changes are introduced, the author may be offered as much as 24 hours to “approve” the changes. Compare this to the standard several weeks to review proofs or months to make revisions offered by academic journals. You’d better not be in the field doing interviews with your six-year-old in tow when a journal decides they want to “fast-track” your piece into the next issue. Or, prepare to subsist on Vivarin for several days. (One wonders how many aspiring policy-writers steeped in academic norms just give up at this stage – someone should study the clash of expectations as an impediment to bridging the theory/policy gap.)

Know Your Bottom Line. The only leverage you have in the end is to decline publication if you don’t like what the editor has done with your piece. As academics, we’re unaccustomed to dealing with that tradeoff, but aspiring policy writers must develop the skill to make ethical judgments about the content and language we associate with our byline.

Ah, go on Charli, you’re in the National Interest.  Ethics be damned. 

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1. Why people aren’t reading your think-tank’s latest report
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3. Dissing Michael O’Hanlon
4. Which newspapers people read in the US
5. Brown’s half year report card

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