Roy Fielding, "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, California, 2000.

 B.  Formally Published Research Findings
 

The major form of first, formal publication of one's research findings in the social sciences is, like that of the sciences, the scholarly journal article.  Scholarly journals are the preferred place for a social science scholar for sharing with one's scholarly colleagues "the report of a detailed, systematic examination of a delimited, specifically defined problem." (Freides, 61).

What Scholarly Journals are NOT

First, though, you must know that there are lots of periodical publications, and that not all of them are scholarly journals.  Indeed, the reference librarians at Cornell library have given us a handy classification of four types of periodicals (http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/skill20.html):

• Scholarly (Journal)

"Scholarly journals generally have a sober, serious look. They often contain many graphs and charts but few glossy pages or exciting pictures. Scholarly journals always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies. Articles are written by a scholar in the field or by someone who has done research in the field. The language of scholarly journals is that of the discipline covered. It assumes some scholarly background on the part of the reader.  The main purpose of a scholarly journal is to report on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world. Many scholarly journals, though by no means all, are published by a specific professional organization."

• Substantive News/General Interest (Magazine)

"These periodicals may be quite attractive in appearance, although some are in newspaper format. Articles are often heavily illustrated, generally with photographs. News and general interest periodicals sometimes cite sources, though more often do not.  Articles may be written by a member of the editorial staff, a scholar or a free lance writer. The language of these publications is geared to any educated audience. There is no specialty assumed, only interest and a certain level of intelligence. They are generally published by commercial enterprises or individuals, although some emanate from specific professional organizations.  The main purpose of periodicals in this category is to provide information, in a general manner, to a broad audience of concerned citizens."

• Popular (Magazine)

"Popular periodicals come in many formats, although often somewhat slick and attractive in appearance. Lots of graphics (photographs, drawings, etc.). These publications rarely, if ever, cite sources. Information published in such journals is often second or third hand and the original source is sometimes obscure.   Articles are usually very short, written in simple language and are designed to meet a minimal education level. There is generally little depth to the content of these articles. The main purpose of popular periodicals is to entertain the reader, to sell products (their own or their advertisers), and/or to promote a viewpoint."

• Sensational (Magazine)

"Sensational periodicals come in a variety of styles, but often use a newspaper format. Their language is elementary and occasionally inflammatory or sensational. They assume a certain gullibility in their audience. The main purpose of sensational magazines seems to be to arouse curiosity and to cater to popular superstitions. They often do so with flashy headlines designed to astonish (e.g. Half-man Half-woman Makes Self Pregnant )."

If you notice, we use the word "journal" only with the first category, the scholarly article.  The other three categories of periodicals are labeled as being "magazines," as Thelma Freides indicates in her advice about distinguishing between journals and magazines (Freides, 58):
 

To understand the role of journals in scientific communication, it is helpful to distinguish between specialized, scholarly periodicals and general magazines.  The differences, while not always entirely clear-cut, are substantial and important.  Typically, the scholarly journal is not a profit-making venture, and it is most often issued by a learned society or academic institution, rather than a commercial publishing firm.  Editors of journals are not full-time journalists, but distinguished scholars in the discipline of the journal, who perform the editorial work in addition to their other research and teaching activities and are not paid for this work, except in honor and prestige.  Normally the editor does not plan the contents of the journal, or assign writers to prepare specific articles.  Instead, the articles appearing in the journal are the reports that come in, unsolicited, from scholars in the field, dealing with whatever topics their authors have elected to study and discuss.   In most cases, authors are neither paid for their contributions (except, again, in professional advancement and prestige) nor required to pay to have their work published.   Articles may be rejected by the editor, usually in consultation with associated who assist him in reviewing manuscripts, on the group that their quality is inadequate or their subject matter is outside the scope of the journal, but the essential idea is to open the pages of the journal to the scholars in the field, as the reporting vehicle for their research.

In other words, Freides sees the following differences between scholarly journals and magazines:  

The research literature of the social sciences is found in the scholarly journal, the only category that pretends to be by and for scholarly communication.  

Note: Most students do not know the difficulty they encounter when searching most general, straight library periodical indexing services--ArticleFirst, SearchBank, ProQuest Direct, Ingenta--as opposed to disciplinary recurrent bibliography tools--ERIC, Psychological Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts.  That difficulty is that the general library periodical indexing services, like ArticleFirst, may include indexing to articles from periodicals which are not all scholarly journals.

You, as a graduate student, are expected to know the scholarly nature of the periodical title you are taking the article from; in other words, you are going to have to know what titles you are more likely to know are scholarly.  An instructor might provide rather gentle feedback to a college freshman that citing Time magazine as a source of information is not acceptable in a research paper; you, as a graduate student, should not expect that same forgiving response.

Where a Scholar publishes his or her research DOES make a difference

This distinction between popular magazines and scholarly journals is taken quite seriously by social science scholars.  Why?  Because, there is a "pecking order" of journals in each discipline--an informal, but very, very real, ranking of which journals are considered "best" for disseminating information about a particular topic or process or technique.

Dr. Swisher remembers some time back in the 60's when he discovered the work of the anthropologist, Louis Leakey (and his wife, Mary, and his son, Richard), who was held in . . . well, lets just say, some disrepute . . . by anthropologists.  Why? Well Dr. Bob was told (by some anthropology graduate student acquaintances of his at Indiana University) that Leakey disseminated his findings through a "magazine" (it was the National Geographic), and not the discipline's scholarly journals.  Leakey  was using popular, non-scholarly outlets like the National Geographic to announce his findings (and take funding from the National Geographic Society's research support mechanism).  The only thing worse, according to Dr. Bob's anthropology graduate student friends, would have been a piece about Leakey's findings in TV Guide or Saturday Review!  He was driving his "research" around the collegial keepers of "anthropological knowledge" in the scholarly journals by "playing to the crowd" through the popular magazines.  Consequently, Dr. Bob's anthropologist acquaintances thought Leakey's findings were suspect and that his was more a publicity hound than a social scientist.

So what do we learn from the Leakey case?  Well, Dr. Bob learned early on in his academic career that scholars take quite seriously the notion that the scholarly journal system is the appropriate place for research that wishes to enter into a discipline's knowledge domain.  The scholarly journal is the testing-out place for new ideas in a discipline; and in any event, the popular,  consumer-based magazine is not a community of scholars, it is an aggregate of lay readers--interested citizens maybe, but not scholars working in a narrow, specialized field.

Of course, this view of the popular periodical press--the general magazine--is not completely negative.  Writing for, or in other ways communicating with, those who are outside a scholarly domain is a good thing: that is what scholars mean when they say that some publication is a popularization.  They mean the item was written in such a way that other literate individuals who are not part of one's academic specialization can understand it.  The technical vocabulary has been softened or done away with; the numerous references and citations to the work of others has probably been done away with.   What you will notice, however, is that only a few of the more well-known and senior scholars and scientists are likely to make it a part of their professional lives to write, or participate in television programs, for the general, consuming public--Carl Sagan ("billions and billions of stars"), for example.  

Do you also recall another example, some 15 or so years ago, when two scientists announced, through the national media (and not through scholarly journals to their colleagues) that they had discovered a cold fusion process:
 

In the 1989 press conference that propelled cold fusion into newspaper headlines around the world, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced what appeared to be a revolution in a test tube. The setup was simple. An electric current ran through two electrodes (a palladium cathode surrounded by a platinum wire coil anode) submerged in a container of heavy water (water with deuterium in place of hydrogen). The result, they said, was more heat than could be accounted for by chemical processes.    --  "Cold fusion - science or religion?" David Kestenbaum. R & D, April 1997, v39 n5 p51(4).

Well, of course, there was immediate skepticism expressed by the scientific community, which had not had any communications offered up by these researchers.  So their question: was this science, or was it, instead, just an end-run by researchers who were looking for national publicity and celebrity?

The point we are making is simple: where a researcher gets his or her research findings disseminated makes a big difference.   Scholarly journals are a mechanism that is part and parcel of the process of establishing the acceptability of research findings to one's community of scholars.

A scholar will not quote something a journalist says in Time magazine as evidence in a research article the scholar is writing about some topic in physics. It just isn't done, because journalists and other professional popularizers writing in Time magazine are writing a re-interpretation of someone else's original scholarly content for another, wider audience of outsiders to the field.  The journalist is writing a popularization of some other original work; scholars use the original research, which was written for and to them and appeared first in their scholarly journal literature.

In some disciplines it is usual for a scholar's research report (an article) to be summarized, along with maybe another article in the same area, into a small, very focused book, called a monograph.  Freides, for example defines a monograph in the process of making these statements:

Research reports and theoretical studies essentially very similar to those published as articles may also appear as books.  Another form, more or less intermediate, is the "monograph," a form of publication that tends to be longer than most articles and shorter than most books, and that usually appears as a physically separate entity within a series of related works. (Freides, 60).

 What you need to remember, though, is that everything that has the format of a book in NOT a research publication.  That is determined by the purpose and style of the writing, but by its physical format.  The Cat in The Hat is a book (and a good one, too), but it is not a piece of research!  Something that looks like a book (its physical format) is not in any way automatically a research report.  Don't confuse physical format with the hallmarks of what a research report includes.  Further, when we get to comprehensive recurrent bibliography, please realize that some bibliographic tools specialize in research publications; some capture all books, no matter their content (a library catalog, for example).

Exercise 9: Distinguishing Among Periodical Forms

Following are three "articles" that have appeared recently having to do with terrorism.  The question is: what type of articles are they?

One appeared in Time magazine:

1.  Elaine Shannon and Timothy Burger, "New Targets for Hamas," Time Magazine, March 24, 2003.

Another appeared in Sudies in Conflict and Terrorism:

2.  "Middle Eastern Terrorism and Netwar," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 22(3), 247-256.

And the last appeared in Psychological Science:

3.  "Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism: A National Field Experiment," Psychological Science, 14(2), 2003, 144-150.

We are going to give you a page where these three articles are found, so that you can inspect the articles in their full-text versions.

Our questions are simple:

1.  Which of the articles classify as research articles?

2.  Which would you feel comfortable using as evidence in a research article you were writing about terrorism, or in a conference research presentation you were giving on some aspect of terrorism?

As another aid to you task, we are going to make available to you a set of "questions to ask" when evaluating a social science research report.  They are from a book by Jeffrey Katzer, Kenneth Cook and Wayne Crouch, called Evaluating Information: A guide for users of social science research.

For both copies of the three articles, as well as an outline of the suggested questions to ask by Katzer, Cook and Crouch, go to this page:

 http://www.ou.edu/ap/lis5703/whatisresearch

You have one week to respond to the questions in the D2L discussions area set aside for responses to Exercise 9.