How to Fabricate an Article

Abstract

While corporate executives freely admit that they work in a jungle, faculty members in in stitutions of higher learning are supposed to pre tend that they work in the relaxed atmosphere of an informal English garden. Their employers are pleased to observe them chatting with the customers. The only purpose in requiring a cer tain amount of scholarly publication by each faculty member is to enrich the quality of the teaching?to beautify the garden. Midsummer mummery! The fledgling professor enters an occupation where the pressure is as pervasive as it is in the world of hard-sell. He is merely handicapped by conditions under which no corporate employee would be anxious to accept a job. His overt objective is to keep the customers happy, or more precisely, to keep them happier than do his colleagues, as measured by evaluation sheets distributed to students at the end of each course. While engaging in this demeaning intra departmental competition for customer approval, he must privately produce certain products called articles. No corporation would merely show a new employee some examples of successful products and leave him at a desk with a warning that he will be fired unless he quickly turns out a few himself. If he spends a year or two on a blind alley, that is his tough luck. Yet this is the type of situation faced by a new instructor. Although 85% of manuscripts for articles are found to be un acceptable when submitted to top-level journals, the instructor's future depends on his landing in the other 15%. The tenseness of the jungle is there, but his students must meanwhile be given the im pression that he is merely enjoying the tea party. What follows below is a seven-step survival manual, designed to mark the shortest route between the instructor's obligation to publish an article in a respectable journal and his receipt of a letter of acceptance from an editor. The author is assumed to be reluctant?indifferent as to subject matter, devoid of raw material, and slightly desperate. Almost seven years' experience at the Editor's desk of the Western Economic Journal suggests that these assumptions may not be un realistic for anyone less than a full professor. Even full professors experience twinges caused by deficiencies of publication.