Professor Art Carden talks about the value of submitting your research to academic journals.
Dr. Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a regular contributor to Forbes.com and Mises.org.
Filmed at the Institute for Humane Studies' HSF-RC weekend seminar on November 5, 2011.
Transcript:
As a scholar you are a professional communicator. Part of your job is to write articles, to write books, to write reviews, to write comments, to write in ways that advance the conversation. So what do you do with something that has been written? You have written a paper perhaps for class or you have written a paper for a seminar or you have got comments on something from a faculty member or comments on something from a friend. Maybe you have written a conference paper or something like that. What do you with it?
Well in the words of some of the people in the circles in which travel, put a stamp on it, go ahead and submit it to a journal. Why should you do this? Because the people, who edit the journal and the people who are going to referee your paper are most likely to be the people who are going to benefit from reading your paper and therefore are going to be the people who most likely would be able to tell you what needs to happen in order to get the paper published and in order for the paper to be a real and meaningful contribution. So a paper that is circulating among your friends, you are going to get some comments on it and it is going to be useful, but, a paper that is in the hands of a journal editor and that’s in the hands of referees who are experts in the field in which you are trying to contribute is going to have a much greater chance of making a contribution.
