Editing Multiauthor Books in Political Science: Plotting Your Way Through an Academic Minefield

Abstract

The Profession were different from non-minorities. 12. If probability distributions are not familiar, imagine laying out all application files along a straight line on the floor. Place files more to the left when they have a low ex ante probability of admission; and to the right if our statistical procedures indicated that their admission probability was high. Then imagine that folders of applicants who were admitted were sprayed white and the rest red. In Figure 1, the solid line is a smoothed outline of the piles of white folders; the dashed line is a smoothed outline of the piles of red folders. References Achen, Christopher. 1986. The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-experiments.

Book editors in the social sciences and humanities: an analysis of publication and collaboration patterns of established researchers in Flanders

“…The editor influences the quality of the edited book through the editing process and the possibility of uniting the chapters into a whole. 5,6 According to Thomas and Hrebenar,7 editing a book consists of 25% organizing and managing, 25% communication, and 50% academic work. Overall, few empirical studies have focused on edited books and their editors, 3 and none have analysed the relationship between the editors and their book chapter authors.…”

“…Although it seems there has been no empirical research into the reasons why authors create edited books, Nederman 6 and Edwards 12 state that editing a book can be time saving, compared to writing a monograph. Moreover, various authors 4,5,7,[12][13][14] have pointed out the possible academic and educational value of an edited book to the field, as the edited books often have multiple perspectives, a broad scope, elaborated data analysis, multidisciplinary research, and a wide variety of methodologies. Furthermore, they often combine authoritative thinkers to contemplate a common problem and foster dialogue or debate about some key issues or theses.…”

“…6 All in all, the edited book can be useful for academics, professionals, undergraduates, and others from different disciplines. Despite this, editing a book appears to be undervalued for academic careers 6,7,12 as their intellectual and community-building value might not be fully appreciated by tenure or promotion committees 12 and are often not included in national performance-based research funding systems. However, edited books have been included in the research funding system in Flanders since 2010.…”

“…Furthermore, as the choice of the contributors helps to determine the value of the edited book and the chances of success in finishing the work, 4,6,13,37 so editors need a large network and good networking skills. 7,12 Therefore, we expect editors to be established and highly collaborative researchers with a large and diverse network. Equally, we expect editors to draw upon their co-authorship network for their book chapter authors.…”

“…In the social sciences about 9% are edited books and about 81% are book chapters. 8 Furthermore, a small increase in the number and share of edited books and book chapters has been observed in Flanders between 2000-2002 and 2009-2011. 9 This implies that edited books are an important publication output, especially in the humanities.…”