A Question of Quality: How Authors and Editors Perceive Library Literature

Abstract

Librarians with faculty status are expected to do research and publish just as their teaching colleagues do. But unlike teaching faculty, most librarians have neither flexible work schedules nor nine-month contracts that are conducive to ongoing research and publication. This means that the requirement to publish in order to be a successful academic often competes with the requirement to perform daily work in order to be a successful librarian. One of the reasons the authors undertook this study was to examine whether the pressure to publish on most academic librarians has an impact on the quality of the literature appearing in library journals. Authors and editors of twenty-two library journals were surveyed to see how both sides of the publishing equation feel about the quality of their end product. This study reveals interesting findings about both editors and authors of library literature, and concludes with suggestions for improving the publishing process.ith the attainment of faculty status by many academic librarians in the late 1960s and early 1970s came the requirement to perform equally with teaching faculty. Of the three traditional areas of effort by academics-teaching, research, and service-librarians have the most difficulty fulfilling the requirement for research. Failure to publish is the most frequent reason for denying tenure to librarians. 1Despite the obvious importance of publishing to the careers of most academic librarians, few are given the time and resources to conduct ongoing, indepth, and successful research. This article examines whether the pressures felt by librarians to publish in order to be successful academics within the constraints imposed by their institutions are affecting the quality of what appears in library literature. By surveying authors who have published in academic library journals and the editors of those journals on their perceptions of the pressure to publish and the overall quality of our professional literature, the authors of this article hope to shed some light on the

Publish or Practice? An Examination of Librarians’ Contributions to Research

“…21 Barbara Floyd and John Phillips conducted a survey of academic librarians and found that the most consistent worry on the part of librarians was that "the requirement to publish in order to be a successful academic often competes with the requirement to perform daily work in order to be a successful librarian." 22 In addition, librarians consistently responded that they were not provided with sufficient blocks of time to conduct research. Jeanne Brown suggested the use of time logs by librarians in order to allocate small blocks of time each day to do research and that librarians should be assured that "we do have time: not enough to do everything we'd like to do, but time nonetheless to allocate as we see fit.…”

From doctoral dissertation to publication

“…For a number of years scholars have expressed concern about the quality, quantity and impact of LIS research output (Floyd and Phillips, 1997;Gorman, 2000;Michaels, 1993;Robbins, 1991;St Clair, 1993). Some writers have advanced a number of reasons for this situation and made suggestions for its improvement.…”

An Analysis of Articles by College Librarians

“…8 Barbara L. Floyd and John C. Phillips re ported that publishing was a requirement for tenure for close to 80 percent of the surveyed authors. 9 Others have looked at how evaluation criteria for academic li brarians vary by type of academic insti tution. Using the 1987 Carnegie Classifi cations to distinguish among institutions, Betsy Park and Robert Riggs found that doctoral-granting and comprehensive universities were more likely to require evidence of publication than either re search or liberal arts institutions.…”