The Hidden Archaeology

For much of my career, this seemed like a silly question. Of course grad students should publish journal articles, book chapters, etc.. I was socialized to believe this. My first few publications originated in term papers that my professors insisted I submit to a journal. I think I had four journal articles out before I applied for my first teaching position.

When teaching at my prior university, I was surprised to learn that some of my colleagues discouraged their students from publishing papers. Grad school is to read and to learn and to write a dissertation. Working up papers for publication takes time away from the important tasks, so students should not be encouraged to waste precious time on publications. Once the Ph.D. was in hand, students can publish all they want (and presumably they would spend less time at that point hassling their professors for help in turning term papers into articles). Needless to say I disagreed strongly with this view of student publishing. If grad students don’t publish anything, how will they stand a chance in today’s job market?

When I moved to ASU, I was pleased to find an academic culture that encouraged students to publish, and I found the extent of student publishing (at least in archaeology) quite impressive. The question of student publishing did not seem to be a concern anymore. Of course students should publish. But then at a party last week, two younger colleagues said they had been discouraged from publishing while in grad school. These were major departments at top universities. Publishing takes up precious student time, and students aren’t smart or accomplished enough to publish anything interesting. I was flabbergasted. My view is that if a student’s term papers aren’t good enough to turn into journal articles with a little work, then they are probably wasting their time with graduate study.

So, for you students out there: Get off your rear and start publishing. And let me modify my second sentence above: you should definitely publish journal articles, but think twice about chapters in edited volumes. The latter will take longer to appear in print, they have less prestige, and fewer people will read them. See some of my earlier posts on edited volumes,  Here,  or  Here.

For some strange reason, an old post on this blog about Nova Scientific Publishers has stayed active as a place for people to sound off about this commercial press. I’m not impressed with them, and it seems that most readers also have a negative opinion too.

My original post is: “Nova publishers: Legitimate or bogus?”  

I have decided to stop accepting comments to that post. Readers who want to sound off about Nova Publishers should see one of the groups started by Darren Pearce-Lazard; these are devoted to discussion about the press.

• A group on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3425349
• A group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=156132787738631

I will add the final two comments to my old entry (they have been waiting for a while), and then I will not accept any others. See Darren’s sites for more information.

This week is Open Access Week. Please check out the main website for the event, and check some of my past posts on Open Access under the heading “Labels” on the right.

Probably the most important thing individuals can do right now is to self-archive their papers (so-called green open access); see my posts on Self-Archiving. This makes your papers more available, and doesn’t require massive changes in institutional funding or organization. When your papers are more available, more people will see them, read them, and cite them. This helps those people do research, it is good for the discipline, and it improves your visibility and impact.

In April, I asked “Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews?” This was occasioned by the LACK of book reviews in volume 21(1) of the journal. Issue 21(2) did have a single book review essay covering three books. But since the books were published in 1992, 2002, and 2005, this essay hardly serves the purpose of reviewing current books in the discipline. Issue 21(3) is now out, and we are back to NO book reviews (zero). I posted a graph of book reviews through time in an earlier post:

“The book review crisis in Latin American archaeology.” (August 21, 2009).

For other posts about book reviews and their importance, click the “book reviews” topic in the list on the right.

WASHINGTON—A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had “entirely fabricated” ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.

The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge “Greek” documents and artifacts.

Just one of the “ancient” artifactsdreamed up in a basement in Somerville, MA

“Honestly, we never meant for things to go this far,” said Professor Gene Haddlebury, who has offered to resign his position as chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. “We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns—everything.”

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“Way more stuff than any one civilization could have come up with, obviously,” he added.

Read more, from The Onion….