How to approach an academic journal

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Solution 1

A journal is not meant to be read from cover to cover*. As you have rightly identified, articles in a single issue or volume of a journal are generally not connected to each other, beyond the broad scope of the journal itself.

What is the right way to approach academic journals, if not to read them start-to-finish?

The right way to approach academic journals is to forget about them. In my own field (cosmology), I would be well justified in submitting any paper I write to one of about six journals. A couple of these are slightly more specialised (or are slanted towards observational astronomy or astrophysics), so I would think about how to frame my results and the overall style and presentation of my paper if I wanted to submit it to one of those. On top of those six, there are a couple more prestigious journals (Nature Astronomy and Physical Review Letters) which have a much broader scope (PRL covers all of physics) but are accordingly extremely selective.

So, unless the publishing culture in economics is far more specialised and delineated than cosmology, you don't need to stick to one journal to find papers on the subject you're interested in.

How do you make the transition as a textbook reader to a scholar that gains actual value from journals?

Do you really sit down and read a textbook from cover to cover? I applaud you if you are able to do that. In my experience, textbooks are usually used as reference works, and you might read one chapter when one piece of information is needed and another at a later time, not necessarily in chapter order. You should treat papers in the same way. Read them to get an answer to a specific question you have.

Is there a reason to spend time with papers written in e.g. the 1970-2000 era? or is it better to get this knowledge from textbooks?

and

I find it strange to hear that people get all their knowledge from journals and don't use textbooks any more.

It all depends on what your aim is. Textbooks are primarily pedagogical, and tend to have undergraduate students in mind as the target audience. Accordingly, the content is much broader and far less up-to-date than what you will find in papers. That's fine if you want an introduction to the field, but if you want to perform research yourself, you need to know what's going on at the cutting edge, which is what reading papers will tell you.

Think of a newspaper -- it wouldn't make much sense to read every issue of The Guardian since 1821 to find out last week's cricket scores. To get that information, I read the cricket column in the sports section of the most recent Saturday edition.

You should, however, absolutely read papers from the 1970-2000s -- and why stop there? Perhaps it's different in economics, but some of the most important papers in cosmology were published between 1910 and 1930. You may miss a seminal work in the field due to an arbitrary date before which you declare works to be valueless.

In summary, don't read journals, read papers.


*Perhaps they were, once upon a time, but research in all subjects has diversified so much and increased in volume so much that it's impossible for any one person to be abreast of their entire subject any more.

Solution 2

You are vastly underestimating the degree to which scholars specialize.

A professor might say that their area of research is financial economics, and of course they'll be familiar with all the basic principles of that area, but what they actually do research on is the financial economics affecting small family-sized dairy farms in Vermont.

This professor might read articles on finances of agriculture, on finances of rural communities in developed countries, on financing of family sized businesses, and on agriculture futures markets. That might account for maybe two or three articles per year published in that journal, and some articles published in other journals as well. That's all. They're not actually up to date on most of financial economics.

Mathematics is more hyper-specialized than most fields, but, as a mathematician, I probably read fewer papers than I write. (No I'm not reading textbooks either.) You don't need to know everything about an area of research to contribute to it, only a tiny subsubsubarea that you know very very well.

Solution 3

  1. What is the right way to approach academic journals, if not to read them start-to-finish?: You read articles on a concrete topic that is of relevance to you. Journals are essentially a collection of independent texts that have undergone some quality assurance. Having said this, it's not uncommon for researchers to look at each new issue of the journals most relevant for their own work if they contain interesting articles. However, this can't be your only source of information. You have to make an effort to find relevant articles even if they are published in journals other than the main ones for your field. Google Scholar or related services are commonly used tools for this purpose.

  2. How do you make the transition as a textbook reader to a scholar that gains actual value from journals?: You Kind-of make it automatically. There is really nothing wrong with textbooks. They contain an exposition of scholarly material that is optimized for accessibility to the main audience. But when you do research on a topic, you will see that the relevant textbooks leave some questions open. And this is when you start looking for relevant articles in journals (or for related monographs).

  3. Is there a reason to spend time with papers written in e.g. the 1970-2000 era? or is it better to get this knowledge from textbooks?: There are of course reasons for reading original papers. For instance, the result you are interested in may not have made it into a textbook. Or, you don't trust the textbook in a detail (yes, they contain errors...sometimes). Or you need more information. Or you want to understand the motivation of the work. And so on. And then it doesn't really matter when the original publication appeared.

Solution 4

As a beginner, you should subscribe to their table of content alerts. Most journals send out the titles (and sometimes abstracts) from their latest issues. They send it through emails, if you subscribe to such alerts. Find it out for each journal you are interested in how you can subscribe to such alerts. If you find the title interesting, read the abstract. And if abstract is also interesting, read the entire paper. You don't have to read each and every issue of the journal from cover to cover.

Solution 5

While the other answers are right in saying that you are not expected to read journal issues cover-to-cover, that doesn't quite reach the question you asked originally -

suppose I want to get up-to-date with the content of Journal of Financial Economics

So a starting point here is not necessarily "understand absolutely everything about financial economics", but something more like "understand what sort of material typically appears in this journal". Journals differ in the breadth of topics they cover, their degree of selectiveness, apparent prestige, and other dimensions. Some are more friendly to publishing papers of niche interest, or that present more incremental work, or that aim to give the definitive account of some research program, or survey papers, or expository papers, and so forth. Reading cover-to-cover is not needed to figure this out, but I do see value in starting with a particular choice of journal, just as a way into making sense of the research field (and being aware that it really is a starting point on a journey that will take you to many other publications).

You can get a sense of what's the case by looking at:

  • What does the journal say about itself? Look at its submission guidelines, reviewer guidelines, "about" pages, and so on.
  • What kinds of paper do they actually print? This may differ from the point above, because a journal's purpose and audience can shift over time, or its ambition may not be matched by reality. By looking at recent papers, you can see whether the Journal of Gadget Studies tends to mainly print work on historical statistics of widget production, and not so much on other aspects of the field.
  • Who publishes in it? Or conversely, looking at people you consider to be important in the field, find out where they land their papers.
  • How are they assessed by experts? While journal rankings are a very contested topic, you can usually find a bunch of online opinions about which venues are good/difficult/proper/hostile/desirable/etc. for which kinds of work.

Answering these questions will force you to look at the papers themselves, not necessarily in much detail at first, but just enough to tell things like "this is a theory paper", "this is a book review", "this is a position paper", and so on. You will also develop a sense for sub-topics within the journal's field, and start to recognize recurring names of people and institutions.

At the same time, you are likely to notice that some topics or questions are more interesting to you than others. You might start reading those papers more closely, following their citations, seeing what else the authors have worked on, and otherwise engaging more closely with the area. Perhaps you will start to have your own ideas and questions about it - in which case, welcome to research!

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Updated on June 08, 2021

Comments

  • Enk9456
    Enk9456 over 2 years

    To begin with, suppose I want to get up-to-date with the content of Journal of Financial Economics. The specific journal has published several volumes in the period 1974-2020. So far, I 've considered strategies as the following:

    • The linear brute-force approach is the first to come to mind, that is to start reading all volumes since 1974 up to 2020. I suppose this can not be done and is probably naive thinking on my part.
    • The linear abstract brute-force approach, that is to read all abstracts from 1974 to 2020, and record all review* papers or particularly important/interesting articles. On the second pass, read only those papers. Maybe this is more realistic.
    • A variation of the previous method, in which we skip the earliest decades e.g. start from 2000-2020.
    • Read only the last years volumes and use textbooks to gain previous knowledge etc
    • Read only the most cited papers* in the journal to get the "backbone knowledge".

    *Unfortunately I see no "review paper" filter in ScienceDirect's UI, so I guess these must be tracked down manually. It seems that sorting with citations is also not available, so these have to be tracked manually as well.

    After some time I guess I was wrong to think that an entire journal is supposed to be read from start-to-finish like a textbook. Yet, I seem to have learned so much more from textbooks that provide organized and logical structures for knowledge. The knowledge in journals seem more scattered, too specific, randomly selected and without knowledge structure (e.g. ten articles in a single volume may have nothing to do with each other). Thus, I find it strange to hear that people get all their knowledge from journals and don't use textbooks anymore.

    Of course, I believe that journals are extremely valuable. I get it that they are the primary material from which textbooks are written. It is only due to me not knowing the exact method to approach them that they (at least at the time) don't seem useful to me.

    My questions on the subject:

    • What is the right way to approach academic journals, if not to read them start-to-finish?
    • How do you make the transition as a textbook reader to a scholar that gains actual value from journals?
    • Is there a reason to spend time with papers written in e.g. the 1970-2000 era? or is it better to get this knowledge from textbooks?
    • Arno
      Arno over 2 years
      The idea to read a journal, rather than (informal) collections of articles seems utterly absurd to me. Are you sure that this is what you want to do?
    • Enk9456
      Enk9456 over 2 years
      Well, not literally to read everything in the journal. Instead, what I want is the following: To reach a point where one (a) can understand new papers in the journal without too much difficulty and (b) understand the main themes and (c) be able to contribute with an article. If a collection of articles can help with these points, I am definately ok with that. Coincidentally, I recently discovered that there are lists of formal collections in some journal, maybe all this time I overlooked the fact that people start with a collection (formal or informal) instead of reading volumes?
    • astronat
      astronat over 2 years
      @Enk9456 you can answer (b) by looking at the website of the journal -- they usually have their "aims" or "scope" listed. Another way to find out is to submit your paper. If it doesn't get rejected, you understand the scope pretty well.
    • RedSonja
      RedSonja over 2 years
      Would it not be much simpler and more effective to do an Economics course? With a set list of books, lectures, course work and exams? Just reading any old papers in just one journal will not give you a rounded enough background to have an informed opinion. That would be equivalent to asking Doctor Google. Forgive me if you have already done this...
    • Szabolcs
      Szabolcs over 2 years
      This is a textbook example of what is called an "XY Problem". What you propose in the question is not the way to achieve what you describe in the comment above.
    • Kuba hasn't forgotten Monica
      Kuba hasn't forgotten Monica over 2 years
      A journal is like a water utility. If your goal is to taste all the water in the world, drinking from a firehose in any given city will be spectacular but almost useless unless your planet (field of research) is barely bigger than the one from The Little Prince. And then some people have wells anyway! The academic equivalent of those would be books that collect and expand on original ideas presented in papers - a book by the author of some important paper may be worth the time much more than the "raw" papers. They may be much easier to digest and have more room to explain stuff.
    • Tom
      Tom over 2 years
      I have never read everything in an issue of a journal cover to cover, that would be an absurd waste of time.
    • David Waterworth
      David Waterworth over 2 years
      You would probably be better off starting with a few good economic text books in order to build up a base knowledge, then find some recent papers which you find interesting - but perhaps don't have the full background to understand at first, and then work back through the papers they reference until you start to understand the topics.
  • knzhou
    knzhou over 2 years
    “as a mathematician, I probably read fewer papers than I write” This has to be an exaggeration for effect, right? I read a hundred or more papers for each I write. I also usually read several textbooks for background on each new topic before starting on the papers.
  • Alexander Woo
    Alexander Woo over 2 years
    @knzhou: depends on the definition of 'read', and also if refereeing is counted. I doubt though, that I have read 200 papers by any reasonable definition.
  • Chris H
    Chris H over 2 years
    "you don't need to stick to one journal to find papers on the subject you're interested in" - I'd change "don't need to" to "mustn't". I'm much closer to astronat's field than to economics, but key results tend to be published in different journals to reviews and it's well worth reading some of the key results in their original papers.
  • user3067860
    user3067860 over 2 years
    If nothing else, it's also a good way to read in "dependency order"...that is, if X depends on understanding Y, then read Y first.
  • Kimball
    Kimball over 2 years
    Do you really sit down and read a textbook from cover to cover? - Is this really so strange? While I think this depends on the type of text, as a student I would often do this, and certainly many classes essentially do this. The point is that textbooks are very different from journals.