* Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University (Israel). A.B., M.A., M. Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University. The author is deeply indebted to Professor Howard Denemark, and to numerous participants on the Science and Technology Studies electronic discussion group.
1. Bernard J. Hibbitts, Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace <http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/last.htm> (version 1.0, Feb. 5, 1996).
2. See Henry E. Lowood & Robin E. Rider, Literary Technology and Typographic Culture: The Instrument of Print in Early Modern Science 2 (1) Persp. on Sci. 1, 1 (1994).
3. See Charles Bazerman, Modern Evolution of the Experimental Report in Physics: Spectroscopic Articles in Physical Review, 1893-1980, 14 Soc. Stud. Sci. 163, 166 (1984).
4. See Trevor J. Pinch & Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other, in The Social Construction of Technological Systems 17, 17-50 (Wiebe & Bijker et al. eds, 1994).
5. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun 1 (1975).
6. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying nn.57-58.
7. Id. at text accompanying nn.119-32.
8. Id. at text accompanying nn.213-15.
9. Id. at text accompanying n.216.
10. Perhaps the particular advantage of which would be the early and rapid dissemination of articles, without waiting for printing and mailing delays.
11. See Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying nn.223-27.
12. Id. at text accompanying n.223.
13. Id. at text accompanying nn.223-24.
14. Id. at text accompanying n.223.
15. Id. at text accompanying n.225.
16. Id. at text accompanying n.226.
17. Id. at text accompanying n.228.
18. Id. at text accompanying n.230.
19. Id. at text accompanying n.228.
20. Id. at text accompanying n.234.
21. Certain other aspects of this literature, such as its lack of peer review and its being edited by students, will be discussed in some detail in a later section.
22. See Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure 110-19 (2d ed. 1968).
24. "[P]ublication is the lifeblood of science
. . . . Journals and the articles they contain
. . . drive, and perhaps define, the scientific enterprise." Daryl
E. Chubin & Edward J. Hackett, Peerless Science: Peer Review and U.S.
Science Policy 83 (1990). It is true that, in certain new fields such as
AIDS, the role of non-journal sources of scientific information, such as
grassroots newsletters, has been important. Debbie Indyk & David A.
Rier, Grassroots AIDS Knowledge: Implications for the Boundaries of
Science and Collective Action, 15 Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization
3, 4-11 (1993). However, the preeminence of the journal still remains the
rule, rather than the exception in science.
25. Charles B. Osburn, The Place of the Journal in the Scholarly Communications System, 28 Library Resources & Technical Services 315, 321 (1984).
26. The chief secondary function of the scientific literature is as a determinant of the allocation of promotion, tenure, and other institutional rewards. See Warren Hagstrom, The Scientific Community 37 (1965); G. Nigel Gilbert, The Transformation of Research Findings into Scientific Knowledge, 6 Soc. Stud. Science 281, 298 (1976). Perhaps the greatest of these rewards has been "recognition and esteem" from peers, traditionally the sole "property rights" available to academic scientists according to institutional norms of science, which emphasize the free exchange of information. Merton, supra note 22 at 610. However, there are signs that recent changes, such as funding constraints, have helped legitimate more tangible property rights in academic science. See Henry Etzkowitz, Entrepreneurial Science in the Academy: A Case of the Transformation of Norms, 36 Soc. Probs. 14, 15 (1989); Diana B. Dutton & Nancy E. Pfund, Genetic Engineering: Science and Social Responsibility, in Worse Than the Disease: Pitfalls of Medical Progress 174, 209-10 (D. Dutton ed., 1988).
27. Arthur Austin, The Reliability of Citation Counts in Judgments on Promotion, Tenure, and Status, 35 Ariz. L. Rev. 829, 829 (1993).
28. Leo P. Martinez, Babies, Bathwater, and Law Reviews, 47 Stan. L. Rev. 1139, 1143 (1995).
29. Harold C. Havighurst, Law Reviews and Legal Education, 51 N.W. L. Rev. 22, 24 (1956).
30. Banks McDowell, The Audiences for Legal Scholarship, 40 J. Legal Educ. 261, 268 (1990).
31. John F. T. Murray, Publish and PerishBy Suffocation, 27 J. Legal Educ. 566, 570-71 (1975).
32. George L. Priest, Triumphs or Failings of Modern Legal Scholarship and the Conditions of its Production, 63 U. Colo. L. Rev. 725, 726-27 (1992).
33. Robert Weisberg, Some Ways to Think About Law Reviews, 47 Stan. L. Rev. 1147, 1149 (1995).
34. Martinez, supra note 28, at 1140-41.
35. Kenneth Lasson, Scholarship Run Amok: Excesses in the Pursuit of Truth and Tenure, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 926, 927-28 (1990).
36. John E. Nowak, Woe Unto You, Law Reviews!, 27 Ariz. L. Rev. 317, 319-21 (1985).
37. Obviously, some of what appeared in the quotes
presented above constitutes hyperbole. Contemporary law reviews clearly
do not go completely unread. Thus, while there is empirical evidence that,
for example, Supreme Court decisions are citing law review articles less
frequently than in the past. Louis J. Sirico & Jeffrey B. Margulies,
The Citing of Law Reviews by the Supreme Court: An Empirical Study,
34 UCLA L. Rev. 131, 134 (1986). Judge Richard Posner assures us that law
reviews are, at least in an archival capacity, "indispensable resources
for judges and their clerks". Richard A. Posner, The Future of
the Student-Edited Law Review, 47 Stan. L. Rev. 1131, 1137-38 (1995).
Leibman and White, similarly, claim that law reviews "serve as reference
material waiting quietly in libraries for scholarships, judges, students,
and practitioners who need help in solving legal problems and in selling
their solutions to the world." Jordan H. Leibman & James P. White,
How the Student-Edited Law Journals Make Their Publication Decision,
39 J. Legal Educ. 387, 397 (1989). Still, Leibman and White concede, "No
one can say for sure to what extent law review materials are used."
Id. at 398. And, as discussed below, it remains striking that the
audience is so widely considered to be
peripheral to the functions of legal scholarship.
38. Indeed, even Hibbitts, consciously or not, appears to agree. In discussing the possibility that faculty assume editorial duties, he worries that,"the outlets for scholarly publication would be radically reduced." Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying n.226. He calls thisin a revealing look at his order of priorities"a development that could have a devastating impact on the careers of many legal scholars, not to mention on legal literature as a whole." Id. Apparently, frustrated readers would not be the major unfortunate consequence if some law reviews were to shut down. Moreover, given his thorough dissatisfaction with law reviews as they exist today, this concern reminds us of the diners who complained:
Diner #1: "This food is inedible! It's poisoning me!
Diner #2: "Right! And such small portions!"
39. Interestingly, Leibman and White attempt to dispute this singularitybut their own evidence contradicts them. While allowing that, "there is something to the statement that law reviews are published primarily in order that they be written," they continue that, "they are not at all unique in that regard." Leibman & White, supra note 37, at 398 (quoting Havighurst, supra note 24, at 24). First of all, however, the basis for the statement they quote here is, of course, Dean Havighurst who, it is worth remarking, omitted the qualifier "primarily." Indeed, Leibman and White's citation refers the reader back to their footnote on the previous page, which presents the fuller Havighurst quotation:
This leads me to a remark that law reviews are unique among publications in that they do not exist because of any large demand on the part of a reading public. Whereas most publications are published in order that they may be read, the law reviews are published in order that they may be written [emphasis added].
Id. at 397 (quoting Havighurst, supra note 29, at 24).
In the accompanying text to which note 43 pertains, they state, "[c]ritics are correct that virtually no one reads issues of generalist law reviews as they do news magazines or even trade publications" Id. at 397. However, had Havighurst meant his statement to distinguish scholarly literature, on the one hand, merely from news magazines and trade publications, on the other, then he would have claimed that "scholarly journals"instead of simply "law reviews""are unique." Furthermore, Leibman and White's support for their statement (quoted at the top of this note) that law reviews "are not at all unique" in their lack of readership, is a newspaper interview with an information scientist who states of the basic scholarly journals, "the best read articles in a standard disciplinary based journal will be read, at most, by 2 percent of the people who receive it. We found there were almost no readers." Id. at 398 n.47.
Yet, this statement by no means implies that the audience was not an important factor in the production of such scholarship (as it appears not to be truly a factor in the production of legal scholarship). Nor does the statement that a given article is read by only a small percentage of the journal's subscribers mean that there is no appropriate readership. For, it is the goal of the author to reach "the right 2 percent" of his field. This stems largely from the specialization and differentiation (not to say fragmentation) which, while not as highly developed in law, is the rule in most fields. Thus, as a sociologist of science and medicine, I routinely ignore most of the American Journal of Sociology's many articles on topics, such as social mobility, which lie outside my range of interestsjust as a psychiatrist might skip the New England Journal of Medicine's articles on infectious disease. There is surely a price paid for such narrowness, but it is almost unavoidable given the volume of material published in most fields; "[i]t may even be claimed that the modern scientist need not read any more journals than his predecessorshe simply narrows his vision until he takes in about as much material as before, over a more limited and specialized range." John Ziman, Information, Communication, Knowledge, 224 Nature 318, 322 (1969).
Even in my discipline's medical sociology journal, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, I read only a small percentage of the articles, because my interests lie outside its leading topics, stress and social supports. Yet I do read carefully most of those few pieces which happen to bear closely on my specific research interests.
40. See Hagstrom, supra note 26, at 35; Jonathan R. Cole & Stephen Cole, Social Stratification in Science 90 (1973); and G. Nigel Gilbert, The Transformation of Research Findings into Scientific Knowledge, 6 Soc. Stud. Science 281, 298 (1976).
41. David A. Rier, Publication and Controversy in Epidemiology: Investigators' Publication Decisions 164 (1995) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University) (on file with the Columbia University Library).
42. Id. at 166. One scientist-subject in this research went so far as to describe his motivation thusly:
[B]ecause good things happen to people when they publish. They get to go to meetings, they get a little notoriety. I was admired by my friends, ultimately I got promoted, you know, things like that. There're no ifs, ands, or buts about it: you get M&M's [goodies] out of it, personal M&M's. I'm not here to solve society's problems, although that's an M&M if you do something that does solve a problem . . . . One enjoys seeing one's name in print, one enjoys doing a good piece of work . . . admiring your own prose, and having other people admiring it.
Id. at 164.
43. Robert K. Merton, Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science, 22 Am. Soc. Rev. 635, 637 (1957). See also James D. Watson, The Double Helix 94, 94-95 (G.S. Stent ed. 1980) (noting Watson and Crick's joy that Linus Pauling's error prevented his beating them to a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA.). To be sure, as Merton has noted elsewhere, such reactions can be considered wholly normative responses to the institutional reward system in science. See Watson, supra at 213-18. Sometimes, though, competitive pressures lead scientists to walk a thin ethical lineat best. For a contemporary case, consider the controversy over whether Robert Gallo or Luc Montaigner was first to discover the HIV virus. See Elinor Burkett, The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS 28-32, 34-36, 40-47 (1995).
44. Often, specialization almost guarantees a narrow readership. Of course, this sentence is true in both senses; specialization also increases the odds of publishing something which could interest at least the small number of colleagues working in the same narrow research area.
45. According to one controversial citation analysis (computer-generated counts of citations to given scientific or scholarly articles by subsequent articles) 55% of papers published between 1981-85 received no citations whatsoever within five years after their appearance. David P. Hamilton, Publishing by and For? the Numbers, 250 Sci. 1331, 1331 (1990) [hereinafter Hamilton, Publishing]. See generally Eugene Garfield, Is Citation Analysis a Legitimate Evaluation Tool?, 1 Scientometric 359, 359 (1979). When the same study looked at breakdowns by discipline, interestingly, it found wide variances in the sciences, ranging from a low of 9.2% of papers in atomic, molecular, and chemical physics remaining uncited, to 86.9% of engineering papers remaining uncited. David P. Hamilton, Research Papers: Who's Uncited Now?, 251 Sci. 25, 25 (1991) [hereinafter Hamilton, Research]. But see John A. Tainer, Science, Citation, and Funding, 251 Sci. 1408, 1408 (1991) (and other letters); Hamilton, Publishing at 1331 (for criticisms of this study's collection and interpretation of data.). For deeper discussions of citations as measures of the influence of research see G. Nigel Gilbert, Referencing as Persuasion, 7 Soc. Stud. Sci. 113 (1977); David Edge, Quantitative Measures of Communication in Science: A Critical Review, 17 Hist. Sci. 102 (1979).
46. As biologist Richard Young stated flatly, if the bottom 80% of the literature "just vanished," "I doubt the scientific enterprise would suffer." Hamilton, Publishing, supra note 45, at 1332.
47. Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities 122 (1975).
48. J.M. Ziman, Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science 102 (1968).
49. See Banks McDowell, The Audiences for Legal Scholarship, 40 J. Legal Educ. 261, 270-71 (1990).
51. See Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying nn.34-39.
52. Traditionally, the power of a profession has been defined as lying in its monopoly over a discrete domain of work, combined with its ability to set the standards for selecting, training, licensing, and judging peers, free of outside "interference." See William J. Goode, Encroachment, Charlatanism, and the Emerging Profession: Psychology, Medicine, and Sociology, 25 Am. Soc. Rev. 902, 902-03 (1960); see also Andrew Abbot, The System of the Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor 52-55 (1988); Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge 71-72, 77-79 (1988); Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine 4 (1982).
53. Abbott, supra note 52, at 54.
54. Freidson, supra note 52, at 76. Indeed, this itself is part of a wider trend, with occupations and trades of all sorts seeking to secure the status, autonomy, and authority of professions via emphasis of their putative commitment to ideals of service. For a witty discussion of this trend in the funeral services industry see Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death 214-34 (1978).
55. See Harold L. Wilensky, The Professionalization of Everyone?, 70 Am. J. Sociology 137, 144 (1964); Freidson, supra note 52, at 79-80.
56. See Wilensky, supra note 55, at 145.
57. Freidson, supra note 52, at 79-80.
58. As it has been since law schools originally turned to law reviews in the 19th century as a way to strengthen their claims that law and its study were "scientific" enough for law schools to belong in the university. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying nn.31-39.
59. McDowell, supra note 49, at 275.
61. Or, they could abandon the quest. If they "accept what [they] have struggled against for so longthat law schools are primarily institutions for training good lawyers . . . that there may be nothing particularly academic, scholarly, or theoretical about [their] professional activity, [they] could concentrate on enhancing [their] teaching." Id. at 269. Of course, it is quite possible that such acceptance will come far faster if the current law review system is changed in favor of the faculty-edited, peer-reviewed form in use in most other fields. Consider that, when academicas opposed to practice-oriented, law professors first "got the support of the university central administration who extended the traditional 'publish or perish' ukase to the law school," this victory was "pyrrhic," because,
[a]s the promotion and tenure decisions were channeled through the various committees of the university system, and colleagues in other disciplines learned about law school scholarship, the family skeleton was exposed. LAW PROFESSORS ARE EDITED BY LAW STUDENTS! . . . [This] is an embarrassing situation deserving the smirks of disdain it gets from colleagues in the sciences and humanities . . . . [E]mbarrassment devolved into humiliation when law review trashing became common . . . . Things got worse. Academics had to fess up to a more ignominious scandal; there is no peer review system for the articles that law professors publish in law reviews.
Arthur D. Austin, The "Custom of Vetting" as a Substitute for Peer Review, 32 Ariz. L. Rev. 1, 3-4 (1989).
But the problem goes deeper than this somewhat quixotic process of seeking acceptance from a community without embracing the quality-control norms which that community considers critical. For, the fact that students select articles for publication in most journals means that they, indirectly, function as gatekeepers in the allocation of institutional rewards (especially tenure) to the professoriatesurely an odd situation. See Martinez, supra note 28, at 1141-42. One could well be forgiven for asking, with one panel discussing student-run law reviews, "Do the inmates run the asylum?" Phoebe L. Yang & Adam L. Rosman, Introduction, 47 Stan. L. Rev. vii, vii (Summer 1995).
62. See Lasson, supra note 35, at 927; Murray, supra note 31, at 567, 569; Nowak, supra note 36, at 319. In this, law professors resemble all too closely their colleagues in other disciplines. For, the mere fact that a field's literature is taken seriously, and contains many important articles, does not mean that all of those who are forced to publish (lest they perish) in it have valuable contributions to add. See Hamilton, Publishing, supra note 45, at 1332.
63. Lasson, supra note 35, at 949.
64. As has been stated regarding electronic publication in general, "Instead of 1,000 libraries in the world having a copy of a particular journal, we will have 100,000 libraries and individuals owning it." Andrew M. Odlyzko, Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals, Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia: The Agenda for the Year 2000 (Robin P. Peek & Gregory B. Newby eds. 1995)(also available on the World Wide Web at <http://www~mathdoc.ujf~grenoble.fr/odlyzko/amo94/node4.htm1>)
65. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at 13. High journal costs and the resulting pressure to cut publication costs and library acquisitions afflict scholarly publication as a whole. Gary Taubes, Electronic Preprints Point the Way to "Author Empowerment", 271 Sci. 767 (1996).
66. Interestingly, printed volumes of the Babylonian Talmud have used something of a similar system for centuries. The core of the Babylonian Talmud (occupying the center of a printed page) is comprised partly of the Mishna. This literature, whose compilation was completed around the end of the 2nd Century, consists of curt Hebrew summaries of earlier rabbinic debates, often elucidating the applications for Jewish practice and jurisprudence of Biblical passages. Typically, each section of Mishna is followed by a much longer passage of Gemara, the other core element in the Talmud. Written in Aramaic and compiled during the 5th and 6th Centuries, the Gemara's extremely compressed language records the post-Mishnaic rabbinic debates which attempted, through rigorous logical analysis, to clarify, reconcile, and apply the issues raised in the Mishna. See Eliyahu Krupnick, The Gateway to Learning: A Systematic Introduction to the Study of the Talmud 15, 15-19 (1981); see also Zvi Bergman, Gateway to the Talmud 1 (Nesanel Kasnett trans., Zvi Zev Arem ed., 1986) On the printed page, the vertical columns of Mishna and Gemara (with each passage of Mishna followed by the specific passage of Gemara seeking to explain it) are surrounded by layers of commentary by later scholars. Chief among these are the 11th Century Rashi and the 11-13th Century group of scholars knows as Tosfot. Outer columns include, as well, subsequent textual emendations, cross-references, and citations to relevant passages in religious legal codes, such as the 12th Century Mishna Torah of Maimonidies, and the 16th Century Shulchan Aruch, which remain the bases of Jewish civil and ritual law applied to this day. See Krupnick, supra this note at 22-23. This remarkable arrangement lets the reader of any given page span the millennia, seeing exactly how original Biblical text was interpreted and applied as the source of contemporary Jewish law.
67. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying n.234.
68. Stevan Harnad, Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals (visited Aug. 28, 1996) <http://louis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/>, reprinted in Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia: The Agenda for the Year 2000 (Robin P. Peek & Gregory Newby eds. 1995) ("The raison d'être of scholarship is to communicate important contributions to knowledge." Compare this to the discussion of legal scholarship, infra at part II).
70. Jack Knott & Aaron Wildavsky, If Dissemination is the Solution, What is the Problem? 1 Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 537, 537 (1980).
71. The Articles Editors, A Response, 61 Univ. Chi. L. Rev. 553, 554 (1994).
72. See Eugene Gallagher, From the Editior, 26 J. Health & Soc. Behav., 4, 5 (1985).
73. Actually, he is not the only one to make the claim. See James Lindgren, An Author's Manifesto, 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 527, 531-33 (1994).
74. Posner, supra note 37, at 1136.
75. Richard A. Epstein, Faculty-Edited Law Journals, 70 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 87, 91 (1994).
76. John T. Noonan, Jr., Law Reviews, 47 Stan. L. Rev. 1117 (special 1995).
78. Erik M. Jensen, The Law Review Manuscript Glut: The Need for Guidelines, 39 J. Legal Educ. 383, 383 (1989).
79. James Lindgren, Student-Editing: Using Education to Move Beyond Struggle. 70 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 95, 98 (1994). Of course, rejoicing that there are more outlets than needed for one's output is a strong sign that its production is not geared for its putative consumers (i.e., readers). We might normally assume that excess capacity should be pared down. Indeed, this is what I thought Lindgren was driving at in another article he published the same year, in which he called for a reduction in the "extraordinary length" of most law review articles. But, no. To Lindgren, this reform would mean that "the major journals could publish twice as many articles. [emphasis added]." Lindgren, supra note 73, at 531 (1994).
80. Leibman & White, supra note 37, at 390-91.
81. The Articles Editors, supra note 71, at 555.
82. Merton, supra note 23, at 606.
83. Crane, supra note 47, at 122 (citing Ziman, supra note 48).
84. J. L. Dusseau, Responsibility of the Learned Journal, 32 Persp. Biology Med. 344, 344 (1989).
85. For an excellent description of the stages by which an initial "knowledge claim" in science reaches the stage of acceptance as a "fact" see Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact 111-25 (Thaddeus J. Trenn & Robert K. Merton eds., Fred Bradley & Thaddes J. Trenn trans., 1979).
86. Osburn, supra note 25, at 321.
87. Ziman, supra note 48, at 111.
88. Harriet Zuckerman & Robert Merton, Patterns of Evaluation in Science: Institutionalization, Structure and Functions of the Referee System, 9 Minerva 66, 99 (1971); see Ziman, supra note 48, at 115-16. There is also some empirical support for the role of internalization. One study of publication decisions by authors in epidemiology found that authors sometimes wrote portions of their paper with reviewers' expected concerns in mind, and also drew upon their own experience as reviewers when preparing their own work. Rier, supra note 41, at 180-82.
89. For a recent example, see Juan Miguel Campanario, Commentary: On Influential Books and Journal Articles Initially Rejected Because of Negative Referees' Evaluations. 16 Sci. Comm. 304, 304 (1995).
90. Harnad, supra note 68, at 8. See also Stephen Lock, A Difficult Balance: Editorial Peer Review in Medicine (1986). Indeed, given what was presented earlier about multiple submissions and the (over)abundance of outlets, it seems that such publication is most assured, and would be fastest, in legal scholarship. See supra text accompanying notes 78-79.
91. Zuckerman & Merton, supra note 88, at 95, 98. See also Lock, supra note 90.
92. Harnad, supra note 68, at ' Abstract.
93. Id. at ' The Anarchic Conditions of the Net.
94. Gary Taubes, Electronic Preprints Point the Way to "Author Empowerment," 271 Science 767, 778 (1996).
95. John Ziman, 224 Nature 318, 320 (1969).
96. Steve Hitchcock et al., A Survey of STM Online Journals 1990-95: The Calm Before the Storm (visted Feb. 14, 1996) <http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/survey/survey.html>.
97. Harnad, supra note 68, at Imposing Order Through Peer Review.
98. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying nn.243-54.
99. Id. at text accompanying n.244.
100. Leibman & White, supra note 37, at 393.
101. Which is by no means to say that many of them read the articles, either. McDowell, supra note 49, at 266.
102. What is said here regarding the leading medical journals could be readily applied to almost any other field:
As scientists we want to publish in these journals because we reach a large number of people . . . ; the articles in these journals are heavily cited, thus we have a greater impact on the field; and publishing in these journals is very prestigious when we look for tenure, grants, and new positions.
Ronald E. LaPorte, et al., The Death of Biomedical Journals, 310 Brit. Med. J. 1387, 1388 (1995).
103. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying n.142.
104. Id. at text accompanying n.122, 143-44 (citing Olavi Maru, Measuring the Impact of Legal Periodicals, 1976 Am. B. Found. Res. J. 227, 23242). See also Richard A. Mann, The Use of Legal Periodicals by Courts and Journals, 26 Jurimetrics J. 400 (1986); Louis J. Sirico & Jeffrey B. Margulies, The Citing of Law Reviews by the Supreme Court: An Empirical Study, 34 UCLA L. Rev. 131 (1986); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles, 73 Cal. L. Rev. 1540, 1547 n.38 (1985) (revealing that, of the 50 most-cited law review articles in 40 years, 21 are from Harvard Law Review and 12 from Yale Law Journalfor other evidence of the disproportionate influence of the elite journals.). But see Austin, supra note 28, at 829 (discussing the limitations of citations as a measure of value).
105. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at n.122.
106. Id. at text accompanying n.238.
107. Posner, supra note 37, at 1132.
108. David P. Bryden, Scholarship About Scholarship, 63 Univ. Colo. L. Rev. 641, 642 (1992).
109. However, this is not a true substitute for formal peer review as a means of validation:
Whether law review vetting is probing, irrelevant garbage, or a perfunctory pat on the head by an old friend, makes no difference since the editor never sees anythingexcept a list of the names of alleged vetters. Editors can be misled into assuming that public vetting is traditional peer review and consequently the piece has been given careful scrutiny . . . . The practice is not a reasonable imitation of conventional peer review and, more important, is vulnerable to abuses that undermine the already fragile status of legal scholarship.
Austin, supra note 61, at 6, 7.
110. Also, it is likely that few papers would garner the sort of attention needed to generate useful comments, thus leaving most articles without real assessment.
111. Stevan Harnad, Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry, 1 Psychol. Sci. 342, 342 (1990).
112. Robert K. Lindsay, Electronic Journals of Proposed Research, 1 EJournal 1, 1 (1991).
113. Therefore, in his proposal for use of "scholarly skywriting", a means of rapid, quality exchange of insights by experts on new topics, Harnard specifies that it is, "intended especially for that prepublication "pilot" stage of scientific inquiry in which peer communication and feedback are still critically shaping the final intellectual outcome . . . . That formative stage is where the Net's speed, scope, and interactiveness offer the possibility of a phase transition in the evolution of knowledge . . . ." Stevan Harnad, Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge," in M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs, Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion List. (A. Oakerson, ed., 2nd. ed. 1992).
114. Charles T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century 154 (Rev. ed., 1985)
115. Indeed, delivery is but the first of many stages before information becomes useful knowledge:
Does use of information . . . mean (a) receiving it and thus getting a chance to read it; (b) receiving and actually reading it; (c) receiving, reading, and understanding it; (d) receiving, reading, understanding, and appreciating it; (e) receiving, reading, understanding, appreciating, and making it the basis of a decision; or (f) receiving, reading, understanding, and appreciating it, plus letting it help you in making a decision and taking an action (or refusing to act) in line with the decision reached with the help of the knowledge obtained?
Fritz Machlup, Uses, Value, and Benefits of Knowledge, 1 Knowledge, Creation, Dissemination, Utilization 62, 63 (1979).
116. Neither does it necessarily render us more careful readers. A similar point has been made regarding hypertext and multi-media in general by Norman Holland in an admirably accessible article on postmodernism in the age of hypermedia: "Texts, finally, are inert objects. They are inanimate, powerless, and passive. They don't do things. Readers act, texts don't." Norman N. Holland, Eliza Meets the Postmodern 4 E Journal (visited Aug. 28, 1996) <http://rachel.albany.edu/ ~ejournal/v4n1/article.html>.
117. After all, even under the current, much-criticized system of student editing, one law professor claims that "nearly every one of my articles has been stronger coming out of the editorial process than it was going in." Wendy J. Gordon, Counteer-Manifesto: Student-Edited Reviews and the Intellectual Properties of Scholarship, 61 Univ. Chi. L. Rev. 541, 544-45 (1994).
118. Jensen, supra note 78, at 383; Leibman & White, supra note 38, at 392 n.26, 418.
119. For example, Section II-B-5 of the current Code of Ethics of the American Sociological Association reads, in part:
Submission of a manuscript to a professional journal clearly grants that journal first claim to publish. Except where journal policies explicitly allow multiple submissions, a paper submitted to one English language journal may not be submitted to another journal published in English until after one official decision has been received for the first journal.
For an instance of the practical applications of this Code, see Eugene Gallagher, Editorial: Heavy Manuscript Traffic on the Highway of Journals, 29 J. Health & Social Behav. vi, vi (1988).
120. Lindgren, supra note 73, at 535.
121. See Epstein, supra note 75.
122. James Lindgren, Reforming the American Law Review, 47 Stan. L. Rev. 1123, 1125-26 (1995).
124. Priest, supra note 32, at 728-30.
125. Hibbitts, supra note 1, at text accompanying nn.239-43.
126. Rob Kling & Lisa Covi, Electronic Journals and Legitimate Media in the Systems of Scholarly Communication, 11 Info. Soc. 261, 267 (1995).