the unedited authors’ cuts

Brayden

Omar points to John Mohr’s citation of an earlier working paper-version of DiMaggio and Powell’s classic 1983 article. We don’t see enough of that. We tend to ignore works-in-progress once they’ve reached their final stop. Why should we pay them any attention, after all? Papers are published, and the final version of a draft becomes accepted as the standard. But what seems interesting about Mohr’s reference to D&P 1982 (not 1983) is that he and others in the discipline are aware that certain ideas were left out of the final version, due to a reviewer’s insistence presumably. And Mohr, at least, seems to think that some of the ideas that were edited out were important to the core argument.

My hunch is that many working papers of the classic pieces, while being far from perfect, often contain golden nuggets that never see the light of day. In fact, you might say that the more controversial or groundbreaking a published paper is, the more likely it is that certain parts of the complete argument never made it to print. The more daring components may get caught in the reviewers’ nets and not see the light of day until some years later when the way has been more thoroughly paved. Why is it, for instance, that it has taken twenty-plus years for us to begin discussing “what happened to field theory” in D&P 1983?

I don’t want to make the argument too strongly. I think the peer-review process is essential to good social science. Without it, we would lack confidence in the quality of findings. But we are all aware of papers that were scaled down (or dumbed down) before publication. Perhaps this is one reason we need more alternative forms of discussion and idea dissemination. Websites are a great place to post working papers. Perhaps we could begin the practice of posting earlier versions of important articles. Wouldn’t it be great to have a website that published earlier drafts (like the editors’ cuts of movies that you see on DVDs) of classic papers? Occasionally we’ll see someone like Andrew Abbott post a rejected paper on his website (with no apparent plans for further submission). Would the practice of posting unedited authors’ cuts violate copyrights?