Ups and downs in publishing

This summer has had its ups and downs in my various efforts to publish books and articles. I did get one book sent off to the press, an artifact report from excavations done long ago. But my agent is having trouble finding a commercial publisher for my popular book manuscript. I just received an acceptance on a paper co-authored with my student, Angela Huster, but not too long ago I got my second recent rejection from American Anthropologist ("This is a definitive rejection, without the possibility of revision and resubmission." Wow.). So, what have I learned? Here are a few things.

• If a disciplinary journal is edited by a scholar whose publications have involved policing the boundaries of his or her discipline, then perhaps that is not the best place to send an in-the-face interdisciplinary paper. Both of my rejections from American Anthropologist this year were interdisciplinary papers, each with an explicit message of "anthropology has something to learn from this other body of research." Well, according to some reviewers and the editor, maybe anthropology doesn't have anything to learn from other fields. Chalk up one more personal beef with the American Anthropological Association and the attitudes of many anthropologists (read why I resigned from the American Anthropological Association). My chair recently suggested I apply for the AA editorship, and I almost fell down laughing.
• Latin American Antiquity is off to a great start under the new editorship of Geoff Braswell and María Gutiérrez. My praise is not based on the fact that they accepted our paper, but on two aspects of the review process. First, the reviews were done in under three months. For a "fast" journal these days, that isn't great, but for an archaeology journal, that is a very good turnaround time. Second, the editors didn't let a single cranky and negative review interfere with their decision. Sometimes journal editors play it "safe" and offer a rejection, or a "revise-and-resubmit" on the basis of a single very negative review. But in this case Geoff and María made the right call and accepted the paper. Around 90% of the criticism of the cranky reviewer was based on one procedure we followed, which supposedly invalidated all of our conclusions. But the critique ignored material presented in another section of the paper that obviated the negative implications of that one procedure. So kudos to the editors for not getting hung up with the one cranky review.
• Commercial publishers are looking for the next Jared Diamond. Most of the replies by editors at the big commercial presses (Norton, Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc.) said that my book manuscript looked interesting, but the projected sales figures from the marketing department were not high enough to justify an offer. Aztec households and communities just aren't sexy enough. They'd love a manuscript that shows how archaeology can solve a major social problem today (as in Jared Diamond), or even some straight archaeology about flashy things like tombs and kings, if written with flair, in first-person terms. But household archaeology? Not ready for prime time. But we haven't given up yet.......
• It is disappointing when you gear up for a big fight, which then doesn't happen. Jason Ur, Gary Feinman and I just published a critique of Jane Jacobs's screwey notion that cities preceded domestication and agriculture in prehistory:

Smith, Michael E., Jason Ur and Gary M. Feinman  (2014)  Jane Jacobs’s 'Cities-First' Model and Archaeological Reality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(4):1525-1535.

I tell the story of why it was necessary to respond to a crazy model elsewhere (an old blog post, and then a recent post on Wide Urban World). But our paper was written as a critique of an article in the same journal by geographer Peter Taylor, who champions Jacobs's model. Taylor believes in the primacy of theory over evidence. Archaeologists don't REALLY know what happened in the past, and thus, "In such situations of knowledge uncertainty, it is the plausibility of theoretical positions [rather than evidence] that matter’ (p. 425 of Taylor, Peter J.  (2012)  Extraordinary Cities: Early "City-ness" and the Origins of Agriculture and States. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(3):415-447.). So we expected to get a reply to our critique from Taylor. The journal editor was looking forward to this, and planned to use the debate to generate publicity, but evidently Taylor never submitted anything. Oh well.

Some memorable reviews of articles

Most review of manuscripts for journals are rather pedestrian. This part is fine, that part needs work, the text on the map can't be read at that scale, cite so-and-so, cite me, etc. Sometimes the reviews are more memorable, either in a positive or a negative fashion. Here are my recollections of three reviews of manuscripts of mine by reviewers for journals. They follow a progression from amusing to annoying.

1. Cite yourself.

Brian Tomasewski and I published a paper in the Journal of Historical Geography. This was an analysis of places in the Toluca Valley, based on the spatial depiction of the specific towns mentioned in individual native historical sources. We used those data to make come inferences about changing political dynamics. The journal sent the manuscript blind to reviewers--that is, the authors' names were omitted. One reviewer provided a helpful detailed review, but complained that the paper didn't cite Michael Smith's work sufficiently! Smith has worked in the Toluca Valley, noted the reviewer, and many of his papers are relevant to this manuscript. Then, the journal editor evidently didn't make the connection between the Smith mentioned in the review and the name of the second author, and asked us to cite this guy Smith. Now some authors cite themselves too much and others too little. I sometimes worry that I am closer to the former than the latter position, so I try not to go overboard. I later told the reviewer I was a co-author and we had a good laugh.

Tomaszewski, Brian M. and Michael E. Smith  2011    Politics, Territory, and Historical Change in Postclassic Matlatzinco (Toluca Valley, central Mexico). Journal of Historical Geography 37: 22-39.

 

2. You should have written a book, not this paper.

All too often, reviewers complain that an author has not written the paper that the reviewer would like them to write. In this case, I had not written the BOOK the author had wanted. One reviewer of this paper gave it a critical review--twice. First for a journal that rejected the paper, and then for the journal that eventually published it. As I recall, the criticisms were very general, more like objections to my overall approach than specific problems with the manuscript. After extensive revision (thanks to a number of very helpful and detailed critiques), the paper was published. This reviewer later told me that it would take a book to produce the kind of work they wanted me to write, not an article!

Smith, Michael E.2010    Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20: 229-253.

3. Yankee Imperialist Pig.

Shortly after the publication of an edited volume, a colleague in Mexico asked me to submit a paper (in Spanish) to a local journal on the general subject of one of my chapters in that volume. This person suggested that a Spanish translation of the chapter would be sufficient, but I thought it would be more appropriate to write a new paper based on the original chapter but with some new material and perspectives. I wrote the paper and submitted it to the journal. One of the reviewers was harshly critical, complaining about lazy U.S. scholarship. How dare I merely translate a book chapter and try to pass it off to a Mexican journal as a separate paper! And what's worse, the manuscript does not even say that it is a translation of a book chapter. This kind of arrogant scholarship, an example of academic imperialism, should not be tolerated!

I was really angry and ready to withdraw the paper. Luckily, my colleague smoothed things over and the paper was published. Authors often complain that a reviewer didn't really read the paper carefully. In my case, it is clear that the reviewers did not compare the paper to the original book chapter.

Academic imperialism is something archaeologists working in foreign countries need to watch out for. Academic imperialism refers to foreign scholars sweeping in to a foreign country, doing their research, and leaving, without much interaction with their local colleagues and without publishing in the journals of the country and region. I work hard to avoid academic imperialist practices, which is one reason I was so angered by the clueless review.