Bowling Alone, Rigor, and the Decline of Social Capital in Academic Service

• Published date: 01 September 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13107
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Jeremy L. Hall,R. Paul Battaglio

Bowling Alone, Rigor, and the Decline of Social Capital in Academic Service 625

The pressure to publish consumes the thoughts

and schedules of every tenure track faculty

member, and the pressure to remain relevant

occupies a considerable amount of mental capacity

for those of us who have been through the tenure and

promotion wringer and survived to tell the stories.

For all of this, we have become extremely productive,

so much so that there is not enough real estate in

the pages of our journals to hold all of the great

research coming out of our faculties and doctoral

students (and practitioners here at PAR). As a result

of globalization, we have seen greater integration of

research from around the world, which only heightens

the competition for our scarce pages. All in all, PAR

will receive around 700 manuscripts during 2019.

To put that in context, we publish around 65

research articles per year, netting a rejection rate

greater than 90%. We are not evil; rather, we must

carefully balance the annual page budget against

glacial changes in our operational landscape. We

welcome research from all of the discipline’s subfields

and from all regions of the world. We welcome work

from scholars and practitioners across generations,

ethnicities, races, and genders and from all institution

types. We even have institutionalized processes to

help promote equity and fairness, and we all too

frequently give the benefit of doubt to a manuscript

that draws mixed reviews. Rejecting a scholar’s

work is a gut-wrenching experience. We know that

individuals would have worked on a project and the

resulting manuscript for a year or more by the time

it reaches our desk. An editorship is, in many ways, a

thankless job.

But our stakeholders are not just those whose work

we publish. We owe high standards of rigor to our

readers, who depend on our review processes to ensure

reliability and validity of the pieces we publish, the

findings of which often change the way we think

about theories, methods, and conceptual models.

Readers must have confidence in the evidence we

generate to inform policy and practice. PAR ar ticles

are downloaded around 1.5 million times per year.

Over 8,700 citations to our articles were registered

last year. Our impact factor rose to the highest

level in history, and the highest rank among public

administration journals. We work through a cyclical

process whereby good research produces increased

readership and an increased desire among authors to

publish in our pages.

We desk-reject about 40–45% of the manuscripts

we receive—only after both coeditors have had an

opportunity to read each piece and deliberate on its

merits. Again, we do this not because we have cold

hearts but because we understand our readership and

the value of generating a product they will value.

Pieces are desk-rejected for various reasons. Among

them, the piece does not clearly address any core area

of public administration (PA) theory, or it may fail to

utilize the PA literature; methods may not be state of

the art, or the topic may simply have been overdone

to the point that the new piece makes only modest

conceptual advances; sometimes, a piece is decidedly

narrow and is more appropriate for a subfield journal.

We often intimate to audiences of editors’ panels at

conferences that we cannot publish good work in

PAR—only the best work—and it has to speak to

the entire PA community or at least a subset of that

community broader than the subfield from which it

originated. This does not mean we do not value the

research we reject but that we must adhere to our

own operational constraints. So, of 700 manuscripts,

we expect to review 400 or more each year. Each

undergoes double-blind peer review by three

anonymous reviewers, generating demand for at least

1,200 reviewers each year. Of those pieces subjected

to peer review, about 50% are rejected, suggesting that

we will call on approximately 600 reviewers a second

time for pieces revised and resubmitted for further

consideration. There it is: we need 1,800 or more

reviews per year. But wait…reviewing manuscripts is

a service for which there is no compensation (save for

the warm and fuzzy feeling it gives to be shaping the

future of the discipline and the seldom-used offer of a

Bowling Alone, Rigor, and the Decline of Social Capital

in Academic Service

Editorial

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 5, pp. 625–628. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI:10.1111/puar.13107.

Jeremy L. Hall

University of Central Florida

R. Paul Battaglio

The University of Texas at Dallas