{"id":10773,"date":"2007-12-03T08:16:24","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T13:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/03\/10773.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:43","slug":"journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/03\/journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"journal-ism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It occurred to me, the other day, that there’s an odd little cultural shift that’s taken place in undergraduate academic life. In my day (before 1990), as I expect for a generation or more previous, a lazy student would find it substantially easier to do the minimum amount of research for a particular topic in books, rather than in journals. Oh, if you wanted to be diligent, there was the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature<\/a>, which involved looking up a topic, and then getting a citation, and then probably looking up the journal in the card catalogue and going and finding it or maybe paging it or even working with microfiche or microfilm. But if you were at an institution with a reasonable library, and you had one title or author to get you to the right place, you could easily pick up three or four books from one shelf to make up your sources for a short paper. Easy as pie.
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Now, though, from the comfort of your dormitory, you can not only search for citations but get the actual text of a zillion articles through ProQuest or Ingenta or JSTOR or ABI\/INFORM or Educator’s Reference or PubMed or the publishers’ sites. Some of the databases have the citations hot-linked from one article to the next, so you can just brip-brip-brip!<\/i> download a whole paper’s worth of resources. And suddenly, all the steps that had been previous invisible, because they were assumed to be a natural part of doing any research, are gone: you don’t have to physically go to the library (which might involve walking, or using your Human Transport Device), you don’t have to learn any catalogue system at all (because the search engine will work on keywords), you don’t have to research when the library is open, you don’t have to bend down to look at a bottom shelf or stretch to the top shelf, you don’t have to physically lift a stack of books, and you don’t have to risk being distracted by any books on any topics other than your own.
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I don’t think I ever cited a single scholarly journal in my undergraduate career. I did get a high score at Addams Family Pinball, though. And I read a lot of books. I wonder if there has been (as I expect) an enormous increase in citations for scholarly journals at the undergraduate level, and at the same time a precipitous decrease in citations for books. On the whole, I suspect that would be a Good Thing, although of course there are drawbacks and disadvantages. I’m not, of course, saying that books are outdated, or that the bricks-and-books library has outlived its usefulness. Books are still books, and there’s a cachet there, even for undergraduates. But I suspect that journals and journal articles are where much of the serious scholarly advance occurs, and that even a limited exposure to that while still undergraduates would give students an idea of what their fields are like at the next level, while there’s still time to avoid graduate school.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger remarks that things were different when he was young.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puff-piece"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18182,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10773\/revisions\/18182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}