Different Publication Cultures
At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them.
The Paper Proceedings Culture
My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities. Music technologists have different types of backgrounds and work in many different institutions. RITMO has music technologists from musicology (the Faculty of Humanities) and informatics (the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences). The latter builds on what I call a paper proceedings publication culture. Informatics, computer science, and various types of engineering are fast-moving fields that often publish in what is called “conference proceedings”.
Conferences in other fields are often based on submitting only an abstract for evaluation; one presents the work and is free to publish it elsewhere afterwards. In the paper proceedings culture, one submits full papers (although relatively short) that are peer-reviewed before acceptance. This gives a relatively quick publication turnover, typically around half a year from submitting the first draft to the paper being presented and published at a conference.
On average, proceedings articles are shorter and less rigorous than journal articles. They are peer-reviewed but often only with one round of feedback before it is published. This makes it possible to publish many articles, which also drives the citation numbers. Therefore, researchers in this culture often have long publication lists and many citations. To earn a PhD in informatics, it is often common to publish at least 6 conference proceedings papers during a 3-year fellowship.
The Journal Article Culture
At RITMO, the psychologists typically represent the journal article culture. Psychology belongs to the Faculty of Social Sciences, and many of its disciplines are heavily focused on publishing in a limited set of internationally renowned journals.
PhD fellows in psychology are usually expected to publish three journal articles during a 3-year fellowship. These are longer and more substantial than conference proceedings, and the peer-review process usually contains multiple rounds of feedback and updates before acceptance. Thus the journal articles are longer and more substantial than conference proceedings papers.
Unpredictable processing and review times are one of the biggest challenges with journal publishing. I have experienced that some journals spend as much as a year on the peer-reviewing process and another year on updates and publication. Journal articles are rarely published within a year of submission, so researchers in this journal culture necessarily have a lower research output in the number of publications.
The monograph culture
I am employed by the Department of Musicology, which belongs to the Faculty of Humanities at UiO. This faculty traditionally values books (monographs) as the most crucial research output, hence one can talk about a monograph culture. Writing books is usually done alone and typically takes a long time. I spent around 15 years on completing my recently published book Sound Actions. I did not work on it continuously over all those years. However, it took time to mature the content enough to make it into a manuscript that I (and my publisher) thought was good enough for a monograph. Sound Actions was my second monograph; I published the Norwegian-language monograph Musikk og bevegelse in 2008. So over my now 20-year-long research career, I have only published two monographs. Of course, I have done other things, and I have a third monograph in the pipeline. Still, it is not uncommon for humanities researchers to spend 5–10 years on their books.
Those unfamiliar with this publication culture may think that humanities researchers are “lazy”. In addition, when looking at the number of citations, humanities researchers typically score low on scores such as the h-index. This is because most humanities fields are generally relatively small regarding the numbers of active researchers around the world. When these relatively few researchers publish books with a long turn-around, the citation numbers will necessarily be low.
The interdisciplinary culture
At RITMO, the three different publication cultures coexist. Some of us, including myself, feel at home in all cultures. I have published conference proceedings papers, journal articles, monographs, and anthologies and value their differences. The development of a new measurement method can quickly be written up as a conference proceedings paper, and a behavioural experiment is more suitable as a journal article. Longer theoretical developments work better as a monograph.
The challenge when working between disciplines is understanding and appreciating the differences between publication cultures. It is easy to devalue the publication culture of others. The publication lists and citation numbers of humanities researchers look unimpressive to researchers in informatics and psychology. However, humanities researchers may devalue anything that does not come in a book format.
This may be fine if one feels at home within one discipline and its publication culture. However, it is a big challenge to encourage multi- and interdisciplinarity. Then it is essential to use a broader set of assessment criteria than what is traditionally used in a discipline. Fortunately, this is proposed in the Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix NOR-CAM. This model was proposed as a solution to help the transition to Open Research, but it may also help assess interdisciplinary research.