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A thread on some writing/publication reflections while editing my article:
In a grad methods course, we were told to pick a footnote in a book related to our research, find the author's sources, & write on how we felt their citation practices aligned with their argument.
1/11
In a grad methods course, we were told to pick a footnote in a book related to our research, find the author's sources, & write on how we felt their citation practices aligned with their argument.
1/11
I'm now working on edits of my first accepted peer-reviewed article (in the works for maybe 2 years now?). And it has been a long road of conflicting advice from well-meaning mentors whose own experiences have been very different. 
2/11
2/11
At times I've felt frustrated because in the process of figuring out how to "do" an article, I've modeled my work on published ones that I admire in the journal. Some have copious footnotes that show their deep research. Some have very tight footnotes with little commentary. 3/11
Reviewers told me I needed to be more meticulous with showing my sources, provide comprehensive citations, especially for a map I created & many events I had counted & summarized info on. So I spent weeks rendering what would become huge paragraphs of technical citations. 
4/11
4/11
In the next round the main editor then asked me to remove it all & in most places reduce whole paragraphs of citation & evidence to a single line or two. I can't help but think about how these contradictions were never something I fully expected. "Give more!" "Write less!" 5/11
It's true that one doesn't have to take every piece of reviewer advice, but then again, if an editor does not explicitly intervene and say "not necessary to do X" when you receive those reviews, you feel that this must be something you probably have to do to get it accepted. 6/11
More often than not, we're told "Keep it to the essentials!" but also, "Show mastery of the subject & engagement with the lit!" And it's an unclear line for many early writers how one does that, especially when they're writing on something with little existing scholarship. 7/11
In that methods course, our "reverse citation hunting" was a practice in critiquing AUTHORS for scholarship, but not discussed as a part of critiquing MEDIUMS of publication & thinking about how they (sometimes to great frustration & effort) shape the final product. 8/11
All to say, departments need to do more to prepare graduate students (& other early career academics) for what a complex (and often contradictory!) process academic publication is. It can be very uneven, relative, opaque, and confusing. It varies wildly by journal & field. 9/11
Much to my surprise, this opacity led people who I consider more senior than me (recently tenured profs) to ask ME for advice on working with certain journals, just because I had been through the process & they hadn't. This really surprised me the first time it happened. 10/11
There have been some efforts by journal editors/reviewers to hold sessions at major conferences on how they make selections, evaluate work-- but many early career folks can't get to those venues. So it behooves us to find many ways to make that knowledge more accessible. 
11/11
11/11
This has been your afternoon editing/academic thought dump. Be good to one another, friends. 
