A Brevity on Worsham's "Fast-Food Scholarship"

Abstract

I read Worsham's (2011) Fast- Food Scholarship with considerable ambivalence for while some of the points she raises are excellent, others ignore many relevant considerations. The excellent points are the frequent reliance on small or biased sample sizes and the use, indeed appropriation, of the arguments of other scholars for positions that they only tentatively consider or even that they reject. I have seen the former both as a prepublication reviewer and as a post- publication reviewer and the latter done to my own work. The weaker points involve length, number of citations, and the lack of currency of cited work. She attributes this to the pressure to produce a large quantity of pieces. Now, as of the date of this writing I am not an affiliated scholar, and therefore face absolutely no pressure whatsoever to produce a large quantity of pieces. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, I keep my manuscripts short, to- the- point, with a minimum of citations, and quite often prefer older work to newer work. Why? Professor Worsham would have it that those who do so are either intellectually lazy or, in the alternative, that papers accepted for conferences are, without further work, being submitted as journal papers. She states, at any rate, that this is her experience as a journal editor, about which I am obviously in the dark. But about the general phenomenon, I am not, and offer here several other, better explanations for the behaviors she deplores. I focus on my own experience because that is what I know best-quite obviously, and also so as not to single out specific others.First, as the scholarly enterprise has grown in size and scope, most of the simpler and better ideas-except in the harder sciences-are already in print. There is just about no field of scholarly endeavor where the average article size has not grown massively over the last forty years. I submit that the latter phenomenon is in large part a direct result of the former. Unless one is starting on a totally fresh topic, which is quite hard to find, one has really only two options if one wishes to contribute an original piece of work. The former, and the one apparently favored by most scholars including perhaps Professor Worsham, is to entertain ideas and theses that are far more complex than the phenomena they purport to explain. The other is to take the older work, and deal with its inadequacies-or perceived inadequacies- and patch them up. The former approach may indeed take 20 to 50 pages, as Professor Worsham maintains, or perhaps even more; the latter approach rarely does.Likewise, and second, the lack of currency of citations may well be an indication of the latter approach, rather than the former.Finally, and third, the number of citations is itself related to the above two approaches, and contra Worsham, indicates little or nothing about whether the author has thought through his or her topic. I know this, frankly, from those citations I have myself garnered from 1980 to the present: Most of them are if not frivolous, marginally relevant at best, and often appear to be nothing more than a display intended to impress referees and editors-a display which often works. I also know this from how often I have been asked to do likewise by editors and referees. …