advice from a woman editor gloriana st. clair june 2005

Advice from a Woman Editor

Gloriana St. ClairJune 2005

Introduction

In March 2005, Susan Estrich, a woman’s advocate, started a kerfluffle with Michael Kinsey of the Los Angeles Times over the representation of women on editorial pages in major newspapers. Discussion was fanned by Harvard president Lawrence Sommers’ comments on women scientists.1

Background

Women are now dominant in higher education – earning 59% of bachelor’s degrees, but still trailing in salaries 70 cents on the dollar.

Explanations revolve around brain wiring, socialization, choice, gender conditioning, and preference.

Thesis

• Publishing is a good way to achieve greater career success and personal satisfaction.

• You already have both the skills and the proclivities that will allow you to succeed as an author.

Main Points

1. View publishing as important and make time for it

2. Network to make your effort effective

3. Ensure against the most common causes of failure

Publishing Is Important

• Librarianship as a field is research-poor. The rate of change in our field is rapid and problems are significant.Factors argue for a robust research environment but, in fact, submissions to journals are declining. Publication is still the broadest way to share research results and best practices. The field needs your contributions.


• Publication is for the ages. As I prepared for this talk, I reread editorials I had written in the 1990s. I still like them and think that they are essentially both accurate and helpful. As custodians of large collections, librarians dedicate their lives to maintaining the scholarly output of researchers in all fields. We should make sure that our own field is well-represented there.


• Publication is good for you and good for your organization.

It can be argued that academics are more interested in fame and reputation than they are in cash. Publication typically doesn’t provide a cash reward, but it does provides an excuse for your organization to give you a raise.Universities and colleges care about the recognition that they garner from the scholarly work of their employees, as evidenced by the mechanisms of promotion and tenure.


• Being engaged in the rhythms of research and publication connects you with other faculty on your campus.

You will be able to mourn with other faculty about the laziness and slowness of editors, the insane remarks of referees, and the torture of cleaning up your footnotes to the standards of an editorial assistant.Other faculty will see your work as being more like their work. Publication is the coin of the academic realm.


• Publishing is personally satisfying. Seeing your name in the index and on the top of the article is extraordinarily gratifying.

My mother was a quilter; in her eulogy, the preacher said that she took scraps and made them into objects of beauty. I would say the same thing about my life work as an editor: I took pieces put together by librarians like you and made them into a meaningful whole.

Ensure Against Failure

Commentators on gender differences often note that women are less aggressive than men. Molly Ivins labels this “just plain old discrimination and the residual effects of many years of discrimination.”2 Pundits point to a different nurturing and to a heightened fear of failure.


• As it turns out, women’s natural and nurtured abilities allow us to succeed in school and college better than men when the playing field is somewhat leveled as it is now.

• All of those skills are the ones that make for successful research and publication. Thus, you are both by nature and nurture in a position to succeed.


If you want to make extra sure that you will succeed, here are six pointers derived from my observations of why articles failed in the refereeing process.

I originally published these points in a C&RL editorial called “Improving Quality: An Editor’s Advice to Authors.”3

1. Not generalizable, and “so what?”

• As discussed earlier, the point of research and publication in a practitioner-based field is to improve both practice and theory.

If your library did something that was different and worked well, the rest of us want to know about it – but we want you to explain it in a way that demonstrates how it might work well in our libraries. That will answer the profound “so what” question.

As a practitioner field, we are more interested in solutions than in theory but, of course, theory is the mother of elegant solutions.

By the way, the woman referee in my experience who most often nailed authors on not answering the “so what” question is now a college president.

2. Poor writing

• All the basics – from good organization to good grammar and spelling – are essential.

Many campuses have either a help center to assist or an ad hoc women’s group to help ensure the quality of the prose.

3. Inadequate scholarship

• Referees are looking to be sure that the author has set her work in the context of already existing work in the field.

Knowing the field and providing accurate citations are essential to quality articles.

4. Weak statistical methods

• Much library research involves survey work and requires a knowledge of statistical methods.

Many campuses have a statistical help center.Even though I have had three graduate courses in statistical methodologies, I would never start a research project without getting the advice of campus statistical professionals.Getting help and/or confirming your statistical methodology is crucial because an early mistake with statistics usually yields an article that cannot be saved.

5. Wrong choice of journal

• Journals have areas of interest, and, usually, they include those in their descriptions – along with their submission guidelines – in at least one issue a year.

Authors should read those descriptions and should query the editor if they think their article might not be a good fit for the journal.

6. Bad luck

• Bad luck is difficult to ensure against but, if you follow the advice on points 1-5, you are unlikely to succumb.

One counterintuitive piece of advice is that, if the editor or prominent members of the editorial board have written a lot on your topic, it may be lucky because they are interested – or unlucky because they know the subject well and have strong opinions.

Networking Helps

Both as I considered the kerfluffle that I noted in the introduction and in my reflections for this talk, I have struggled with whether the fact that I was a woman made any difference in my work as an editor…

Networking Helps

• I have always believed that I was selected to edit College & Research Libraries through affirmative action.

ACRL was embarrassed that it had not had a woman editor in its first fifty years and gambled that I would succeed – and I did.Unfortunately, I am still the only woman editor of C&RL, and the only non-director or dean to hold the position.

Networking Helps

• Here are some of the things that I did as an editor that were different than what a man might have done:

ACRL asked that the journal come out in the month that was on the cover. For six years, it did.The network that I used to produce it was different from that used previously. I drew on a different set of individuals to help with the journal.

Networking Helps

Gender, race and geographical diversity are important to ACRL, and I worked hard to accommodate those prescriptions. I also shared creation of editorials with the board to make the editorial voice more diverse.I strove for a kinder, gentler response to unsuccessful authors. I fussed with the referees not to write cutting comments. Throughout my tenure, we rejected six out of ten articles and had a year-long backlog.

Networking Helps

At the request of both men and women on the editorial board, I gave board members feedback on their work.I had a close relationship with Althea Jenkins, the executive director of ACRL, and worked hard to guard the budget for C&RL and to keep the publications committee happy.

Networking Helps

When members of the editorial board and I left the Journal of Academic Librarianship and launched a new journal, portal, we began a mentoring program. We thought that we could not afford to waste the scarce work of librarians in the field, and we wanted to help new entrants to publishing to be successful the first time around.

Sarah Pritchard, Karyle Butcher, Deborah Dancik and other women on the portal board were instrumental in the mentoring initiative.

What to Write About

• Intellectual property issues• Usability testing• Innovations in your libraries• Unique collaborations• Changing information seeking habits

of students/faculty• User studies concerning digital

information

Conclusions

Our time as women is arriving. As we begin to dominate in college graduation rates, we will begin to increase and dominate in the professions. Places on editorial pages and editorships of major journals will come to us.

Conclusions

I hope that the second woman editor of C&RL is in the audience today.

Let me know what I can do to help her achieve this career ambition. And when she does achieve it, she will acquit it in a way that is different from and better than how a man would have done it.

Thank you

Dr. Gloriana St. Clair [email protected] of University LibrariesCarnegie Mellon University

Endnotes

1. “Women and Opinion,” on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation, hosted by John Ydstie (March 30, 2005). Transcript available via LexisNexis Academic.

2. Ibid.3. “Improving Quality: An Editor’s Advice to

Authors,” College & Research Libraries 54, no. 3 (May 1993): 195-197.