In What Way the Review Is More Weighty than the Article

Abstract

It is commonly thought that the review is, in every way, less weighty than the article. (I am speaking here of reviews of articles not of books which are very different, just as the authorship of books is very different from the authorship of articles. And I am speaking on the basis of my experience having reviewed in print almost four-dozen articles.) This conventional wisdom is almost true: It is true, perhaps, in every academic way, but is far from true ethically. It is certainly far less creative to write a review- which is, in some sense, a response to someone else's ideas-than to come up with one's own ideas. Also, articles are typically longer than reviews, and therefore take more effort in craftsmanship as well, not merely in thought.The ethical dimension is rather different from the creative dimension and the composing dimension. When one writes an article, one has many levels of protection from error. One normally circulates preliminary drafts to what Blaise Cronin calls one's trusted assessors. Then, an editor takes a preliminary look and decides whether it is even worth forwarding to referees. If the article passes these informal screens, one or more referees evaluate it critically, often with more of an eye to rejection than acceptance, and when acceptance is recommended, the author is usually required to make significant, sometimes substantial, revisions. The revisions are then checked against the referees' recommendations, at least cursorily by the editor, and sometimes in depth by both the referees and the editor. It goes without saying that many articles receive relatively little scrutiny compared to others, and what we have described above is, perhaps, a bit romantic (or tedious, depending on one's perspective). But it remains true that articles do not readily and ordinarily appear in print without significant scrutiny by others.If, despite this scrutiny, a piece appears in print that is littered with errors of substance, only the author's reputation normally suffers. When an author puts an idea in print, he is choosing, to some extent at least, to risk his own reputation-but only his own reputation.The reviewer, in contrast, is in an entirely different position in two key respects. First, he has someone else's reputation in his hands besides his own and, second, there is very little scrutiny of the sort the author faces to deter erroneous substantive judgments. There are, of course, editors of various kinds who pass judgment on reviews, and who may and do choose to decline them, but in almost all cases, such scrutiny is, of necessity, limited to the text of the review itself, without comparable scrutiny of the reviewed text alongside it. Now, this is not a criticism of review journals for, if the editors were required to examine not only the reviewer's text but also the reviewed text alongside it, they would be duplicating the efforts of the reviewer and could not possibly produce a journal that publishes a substantial number of reviews at regular intervals. …