Bluebooks and Academic Publishing
I’m on a vacation of sorts until Monday. I may post something tomorrow, but probably not. Meanwhile, here’s a great post by Scott Greenfield, succinctly summing up my (and most of my classmates’) views on the Bluebook. It’s called “Once There Was a Bluebook.”
I like the turn at the end, where he sticks one to the law profs and accuses them of desiring arcane knowledge to raise the barrier of entry to law journals. I don’t know how true that is on an individual level, but the incentives are there on an institutional level to make it a plausible scenario.
This points to a larger problem: the tension between a strictly controlled, “peer review” system of academic publishing, and a free for all, wikipedia-style publishing. Peer review ensures quality (and correct citation formats), but a more free publication would make it so, as Mr. Greenfield says, “anybody could do it,” providing an venue for ideas challenging the accepted paradigms in whatever field. I think this is important, especially outside of the hard sciences. Hard science relies more on empirical data to disprove its accepted theories far more than non-hard science fields, which means that a small journal committee doesn’t have as much room to wiggle around and prevent non-accepted research or conclusions into their academic publications.
Anyway, I’m already running late, more when I get back.
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:14 pm
I feel that Field Artillery has the same thing going on with regard to radio transmissions of Call For Fire and the Messages determined by the Fire Direction Center. We spend 10 hours a week in a classroom learning how to compute accurate firing data and 30 hours learning how to distribute this data in the proper channels and with the proper nomenclature.