Betting on Vetting

By Peter Baldwin. Evaluation, not publication, should be academe’s new priority.
Imagine that, having polished a dissertation for publication or finished a second or later book, the social-science scholar sends the typescript to an independent Review Institute. The institute determines a list of five to 10 scholars worldwide who are best placed to evaluate the work, taking into account both those experts cited in it and others who, though prominent in the field, may have a different take on the subject. For a fee like the one publishers now pay outside readers, each evaluator writes a two-page appraisal of the work, avoiding any summary and dealing only with its qualities. Numbers are also assigned on a uniform scale over a range of areas: Quality of the empirical base? How well written? Novel or familiar ground? Advanced or introductory readership? Balanced or polemical? And the like. More...