Sewell on the capitalist epoch (and its possible end)

Following someone's Twitter trail, I came upon an entire issue from 2014 of the journal Social Science History that has been made freely available (link). It contains an address by sociologist William Sewell, as well as a piece by Julian Go on British imperialism 1760-1939, among other things.

Journal note

The March 2014 issue of International Theory is currently available for free (here). It includes a symposium on "Theories of Territory beyond Westphalia."

Yet another journal special issue on Realism

Int'l Politics, Nov. 2013
[link to table of contents]

New issue of Int'l Politics

Table of contents here.

New issue of EJIR

Several interesting-sounding articles. Table of contents here.

A.m. linkage

- Annan interviewed on his new memoir.

- The new issue of International Relations is a special number on the Cuban missile crisis 50 years on.

On citing articles without really bothering to read them

It's one thing to skim an article and write a blog post taking off from the article or commenting on an aspect of it; blogs are not journals. It's quite another thing to submit a paper to a refereed journal and cite an article for an opposite argument than the one it actually makes, or for some proposition it has nothing to say about. C. Blattman draws attention to the editors' notes in the current APSR which mention this as a widespread problem. If it is a widespread problem -- and although I don't follow the journals all that closely, I'm inclined to think it probably is -- it's deplorable. There are two possible reasons for this: carelessness or outright dishonesty. I've also noticed problems with the way books are cited, which the APSR editors also mention. Recently I've seen an article that cited a book for a proposition that the book had little or nothing to do with; I've also seen an article, in a 'top journal', that cited books this way, not once or twice but quite a lot: Smith 1998 or Jones 2002 -- no page numbers, no chapter numbers even, just the author's last name and the publication date. This is often both unhelpful and potentially misleading, as it can create the impression that the entire book fully supports whatever point in the text it's being cited for. It's certainly not a completely indefensible practice and there are times when it's entirely appropriate but, IMO, it should be used with some discrimination.

Just so I don't come off as a disgruntled grouch, there are of course still articles published which cite works in an exemplary way. But this shouldn't really be an issue at all. Part of the problem is that there is too much being published and authors are afraid their submissions will be rejected for failure to cite some allegedly relevant piece, so they will cram in tons of citations whether they have actually read them carefully or not.

I have had only one experience with submitting an article and getting readers' reviews of it -- it was about five years ago and the article was, admittedly, not fully baked (it was not drawn from my dissertation but was about something entirely different). There were two reports, one quite cursory, the other impressively long and detailed, both recommending rejection. The long, detailed report faulted the piece on several grounds ("undertheorized and empirically weak" is the phrase that I recall) but one of the criticisms was that I hadn't cited this, that and the other. The reviewer was right: I hadn't cited X and Y. Should I have? Quite possibly. On the other hand, I would rather have had the article rejected, as it was (I never did anything with it after that or tried to get it published anywhere else) than have cited works I hadn't actually read or at least looked at with sufficient care to determine what they were actually saying.

I think this post probably should be filed under "rants" but I'm just going to put it under "miscellaneous."

(P.s. I've published book reviews but they're a different kettle of fish than articles.)

Noted in passing

I used to subscribe to Dissent but I haven't in a long time. Glancing at its website just now, however, I spot several articles in the current issue that may be of interest to some readers, including one about Minnesota. They're all gated, i.e., to read them you have to shell out twenty bucks to subscribe. Just thought I'd mention it, fwiw.

Noted

The Michigan War Studies Review.
(For those interested in military history.)

The latest issue of PSQ, etc.

That's Political Science Quarterly. I don't subscribe but happened to see the current issue in a bookstore today. It carries, among other things, pieces by Juan Cole (on Pakistan and Afghanistan), Christopher Fettweis (a historical analysis of terrorism), and John Mueller (war is nearly extinct, or on the road to extinction, or whatever). I almost bought it but in the end decided not to shell out the thirteen bucks. It does appear to be an interesting issue, however.

On a lighter, indeed somewhat frivolous note: What's up with the weather in D.C.? While all eyes (or many eyes) are on that increasingly meaningless ritual known as a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the meteorological gods are bestowing some totally atypical, gorgeous days: sunny, not very humid, slightly breezy; in a word, idyllic -- especially by the standards of the swamp that is Washington and environs. I'm sure we've done nothing to deserve this, but I hope the masters of meteorological fortune remain so gloriously confused.

Waltz symposium

In my e-mail inbox today is the table of contents for the June issue of International Relations (published by Sage), which carries the first part of a symposium titled "The King of Thought: Theory, the Subject, and Waltz," with a well-known cast of contributors. Thought I'd mention it in case someone is stopping by here who is interested but may not get the table-of-contents alert. (As to whether I'm going to read the articles themselves -- very unlikely, but I did look quickly at a few of the abstracts. At least a couple of the pieces will probably be of interest to those with theoretical preoccupations.)