Fun with Academentia #247: Reviews

@petitemaoiste

I read readers' reports for a thing I sent to a press and it feels like listening to eulogies at your own funeral in a good way.#academentialess than a minute ago via web
Anonymous reader reports are fundamental for academentia, the premise of objectivity in peer-reviewed publications validates you as a scholar and is the basis for hiring and tenure. This is trickier than it sounds, since if you are collegial, a team player, go to a school where a particular subject area is prominent either as a student or teacher, and this leads others with shared interests to go there too, you end up being friendly or close friends with other people working in areas similar to yours. However, the reviewers for books, articles, tenure, etc. are supposed to be impartial. So in this way, paradoxically, being a collegial person or working collaboratively or being recruited as part of efforts to develop a core of faculty in a particular area might actually make this type of evaluation difficult. In my case, I was lucky to find people who were not close friends, who were anonymous reviewers, and who supported my project and gave me fabulous feed-back. On top of this, they had to address my standing in my field and were very complementary, hence my reaction that it felt like I was listening to eulogies at my own funeral. If you are working in the high-pressure world of academentia, you need to have a sense of humor!