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[carebearstare]

DVF, 3 peer-reviewed articles in history per year would be unthinkable.

Why?  

I'm not asking to be confrontational or facetious, my university periodically tries to come up with some kind of uniform set of hallmarks for "research productivity", and it would be useful to have some kind of convincing, objective way of understanding (if not explicitly comparing) the publication norms for various fields. - DvF

I am not in history, but my understanding is that it simply takes a lot longer to produce a historical article from start to finish--more time to find a niche, more time to research, and more time to get it into print. I can't imagine being able to "bang out" an article in history the way I've seen folks do it in some other disciplines, including my own.

To the OP: A book and 3 articles sounds reasonable, even low, for an institution of the caliber you mention. In my field at R1/R2 institutions, 10-12 articles for tenure is the norm.

[whiteknight]

DVF, 3 peer-reviewed articles in history per year would be unthinkable.

Why? 

I'm not asking to be confrontational or facetious, my university periodically tries to come up with some kind of uniform set of hallmarks for "research productivity", and it would be useful to have some kind of convincing, objective way of understanding (if not explicitly comparing) the publication norms for various fields. - DvF

Others may have a better answer (LarryC? Mountainguy?), but in my field, research requires travel to archives across the U.S., which is very time-consuming. Add to that time the fact that I can't publish much of the research in articles pre-book; otherwise, the book is essentially meaningless, and my publisher would not be happy. Throw in the limited number of journals that my uni considers important for tenure, and there is no possible way for me to publish that frequently.

[onion]

I'm a historian, and I'm at an R1 now.  I have a 2/2 load, 2 preps a semester, one bigger class and one smaller class.  You get one semester of pre-tenure leave.  For tenure, you need a book out and significant progress toward the second book (this could be an advanced contract, a couple of articles, etc.).   So, OP, what you describe sounds reasonable for an R1.

DvF, as for why historians couldn't do 2 to 3 peer-reviewed articles a year:  Historians often have to travel to archives, and the actual research (sifting through boxes, discovering you've hit a dead end, running up against a library's draconian photocopying/scanning policy, which means you have to type the material into your laptop) is incredibly time consuming.  Even if you are lucky enough to have your archive in your town or only a couple of hours away, most Special Collections rooms are only open 4 (or 5, if you're lucky) days a week, from 9 to 5.  This makes it tough to research during the semester.  If your archives are in Istanbul or Paris, or even DC and you're on the West Coast, you have to plan your trips for semester breaks.  For me, a preliminary research trip that will yield about 1/3 of an article will take 6 solid days in the archives--and that's if the collection has what I thought/hoped it had.  So once you have all of your research collected (which could take an entire summer), you then have to re-read it, and do more secondary source reading, and pull it all together into a cogent, original, and not boring narrative.  Then you submit it to a journal.  History journals move at a glacial pace; for my last article, I submitted it in September 2004, got an R&R in January 2005, and it was finally published in Nov. 2007.  This was fast for history.  The editors had decided to hang onto it for a "special edition."  I also think that in the Humanities (but I can really only speak to history), articles tend to be much longer than in the sciences (and if I'm wrong, I'm not trying to offend anyone).  An article will be about 30 published pages, which is closer to 45 word-processed pages.

So the smart thing to do is to always be researching two projects at the same time.  When I was researching the first book, I was collecting material for project #2, which I'm now trying to fill out.  I haven't been to the archives since May, and probably won't get back until January, and won't have time to get to the 4 other archives I need to go to for a couple of years.  I can probably get one article out of this research I have now, but I can't pull together more articles (or, in my case, book #2) until I get a semester off, and that won't be for a couple years.  Even then, I don't know how I will fund all that travel.  Shrinking state budgets has cut out travel and research funding, and grants are not as generous or plentiful in the humanities.  Sometimes you can cobble together small travel grants ($300-$500 to use a particular collection), but staying in a hotel in a strange place for a week costs dough.  Not to mention food!  And, oh!  If you have a family that you can't desert for weeks on end...

So I hope that demonstrates, in a nutshell, what historians are up to, and why it seems like it takes us so long.  I think anthropologists have it worse, but I think their grant opportunities may be slightly better.

[bookishone]

I'm a historian, and I'm at an R1 now.  I have a 2/2 load, 2 preps a semester, one bigger class and one smaller class.  You get one semester of pre-tenure leave.  For tenure, you need a book out and significant progress toward the second book (this could be an advanced contract, a couple of articles, etc.).   So, OP, what you describe sounds reasonable for an R1.

DvF, as for why historians couldn't do 2 to 3 peer-reviewed articles a year:  Historians often have to travel to archives, and the actual research (sifting through boxes, discovering you've hit a dead end, running up against a library's draconian photocopying/scanning policy, which means you have to type the material into your laptop) is incredibly time consuming.  Even if you are lucky enough to have your archive in your town or only a couple of hours away, most Special Collections rooms are only open 4 (or 5, if you're lucky) days a week, from 9 to 5.  This makes it tough to research during the semester.  If your archives are in Istanbul or Paris, or even DC and you're on the West Coast, you have to plan your trips for semester breaks.  For me, a preliminary research trip that will yield about 1/3 of an article will take 6 solid days in the archives--and that's if the collection has what I thought/hoped it had.  So once you have all of your research collected (which could take an entire summer), you then have to re-read it, and do more secondary source reading, and pull it all together into a cogent, original, and not boring narrative.  Then you submit it to a journal.  History journals move at a glacial pace; for my last article, I submitted it in September 2004, got an R&R in January 2005, and it was finally published in Nov. 2007.  This was fast for history.  The editors had decided to hang onto it for a "special edition."  I also think that in the Humanities (but I can really only speak to history), articles tend to be much longer than in the sciences (and if I'm wrong, I'm not trying to offend anyone).  An article will be about 30 published pages, which is closer to 45 word-processed pages.

So the smart thing to do is to always be researching two projects at the same time.  When I was researching the first book, I was collecting material for project #2, which I'm now trying to fill out.  I haven't been to the archives since May, and probably won't get back until January, and won't have time to get to the 4 other archives I need to go to for a couple of years.  I can probably get one article out of this research I have now, but I can't pull together more articles (or, in my case, book #2) until I get a semester off, and that won't be for a couple years.  Even then, I don't know how I will fund all that travel.  Shrinking state budgets has cut out travel and research funding, and grants are not as generous or plentiful in the humanities.  Sometimes you can cobble together small travel grants ($300-$500 to use a particular collection), but staying in a hotel in a strange place for a week costs dough.  Not to mention food!  And, oh!  If you have a family that you can't desert for weeks on end...

So I hope that demonstrates, in a nutshell, what historians are up to, and why it seems like it takes us so long.  I think anthropologists have it worse, but I think their grant opportunities may be slightly better.

Onion has it exactly right. This is my experience also. Plus there is, I believe, more emphasis on how you're making your argument. You're not just "writing up the data." Most of my articles go through half a dozen major revisions (total rewrites) and the argument can change drastically as I refine my thinking along the way.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

Well, except for the travel/archival aspects, the rest doesn't sound too much different from many fields, including the theoretical sciences:  research is hard, mainly you hit dead ends, papers are far more than just "writing up data", journals are slow to review and publish.  However, this is interesting and useful.  Is the relative difficulty in obtaining source materials tracked in departmental tenure policy?  For example, if a History department in Illinois has one specialist in 19th Chicago labor relations, and another in medieval Romanian herpatology, is the expected publication rate for the latter adjusted downward compared to the former? - DvF

[shamu]

One of the institutions to which I have accepted a conference interview requires a book and three peer-reviewed articles. The institution is a large state university that is not well-known for my discipline, and the dept. has a 2-2 teaching load.

Is this type of publishing standard the norm in the humanities? I expected to have to produce a book, but three peer-reviewed articles on top of a book seems like a lot for a non-elite institution.

Sounds about right; maybe even a bit generous, as others have commented. Also, what exactly do you mean by "non-elite institution"? Not Oxford or Cambridge? Anything without at least a 700-year history is non-elite so we are dealing with quite a large pool here.

I assume with a 2/2 load, it has to be a RU-VH or RU-H, and they will have decent research expectations, especially with that teaching load.

[erzuliefreda]

In the departments I know, everyone has to publish at the same rate, regardless of your subject area. However, if you do ancient or medieval, for instance, other types of projects count (such as translations and annotated editions of texts, etc.), which opens up a few additional scholarly opportunities.

The sheer amount of primary source research that goes into producing good historical work can be surprising, given the fact that most sources we read in an archive don't even make it into a reference. Add in newspapers that aren't indexed, handwritten archival documents, and archival collections that aren't arranged in any way that aids your particular research efforts, and it can all become very time consuming.

[onion]

One of the institutions to which I have accepted a conference interview requires a book and three peer-reviewed articles. The institution is a large state university that is not well-known for my discipline, and the dept. has a 2-2 teaching load.

Is this type of publishing standard the norm in the humanities? I expected to have to produce a book, but three peer-reviewed articles on top of a book seems like a lot for a non-elite institution.

Sounds about right; maybe even a bit generous, as others have commented. Also, what exactly do you mean by "non-elite institution"? Not Oxford or Cambridge? Anything without at least a 700-year history is non-elite so we are dealing with quite a large pool here.

I assume with a 2/2 load, it has to be a RU-VH or RU-H, and they will have decent research expectations, especially with that teaching load.

I used to be at a regional state university that was not at all known for my discipline, and it actually had far higher standards for tenure than the RU/VH (or R1) I'm at now.  My former employer wanted 2 books--one out, one at least in press, and junior people had 4/4 loads and no TAs (tenured folks had 2/3 or 3/3).  There was serious mission creep and they were looking to dump people at tenure time and then offer a series of renewable contracts, but no tenure.  And they're succeeding. 

[tenured_feminist]

D_v_F, the historians have explained it well, but I'd suggest going and doing a little empirical research of your own. Go flip through the latest AHR and then come back and tell us what you think.

OP, at my completely unprestigious RU-VH/R1, a history file that came up with a book and three PR might or might not make it. It would depend on 1) the quality of the outlets, 2) the quality of the external letters, and 3) the extent to which the candidate could make the case that a substantial post-dissertation research stream has been established. I know someone here who had a rocky (but ultimately successful) trip through with a book on a good press and six, not counting non-PR. 

[pinkmouse]

That sounds like a pretty reasonable tenure requirement.
Curious: OP, if you think that is a lot, what were you expecting?

[normative_]

It's not demanding at all.

The exchange rate on books seems to be 4 journal articles (so these are interchangeable), plus you're expected to perform on winning external funding grants.

[polly_mer]

Onion has it exactly right. This is my experience also. Plus there is, I believe, more emphasis on how you're making your argument. You're not just "writing up the data." Most of my articles go through half a dozen major revisions (total rewrites) and the argument can change drastically as I refine my thinking along the way.

Well, except for the travel/archival aspects, the rest doesn't sound too much different from many fields, including the theoretical sciences:  research is hard, mainly you hit dead ends, papers are far more than just "writing up data", journals are slow to review and publish. 

I wish to add my voice to DvF's about the evident dismissal of how difficult it is to design an experiment to generate the data, analyze it, and then write it up.  Most scientists are not working with an army of graduate students with postdocs to manage them.  I'm not saying that historical research is easy, particularly with the travel involved, but I, as a simulationist and frequent theoretician, spend a lot of time reading the literature in multiple overlapping fields, going down dead-ends, defending my arguments based on my literature review of the previous hundred years (many of my sources are in foreign or out of print journals that are not electronic), and doing it with minimal assistance in gathering data from the undergraduates who have zero training in this field so I need to be continually training a new assistant to help me gather data after I've figured out the experiments I need to do and program them up.

[thehighking]

It's not demanding at all.

The exchange rate on books seems to be 4 journal articles (so these are interchangeable), plus you're expected to perform on winning external funding grants.

Is this really true? How is it that 4 journal articles are equal to one book?

[dw2007]

That sounds like a pretty reasonable tenure requirement.
Curious: OP, if you think that is a lot, what were you expecting?

Someone upthread pegged me. I'm in history.

The past few years I've been teaching at a local community college while working on my dissertation. When I started grad school, the expectation at the state uni like I'm interviewing at was a book for tenure. I'm just a little surprised (and, yes, I bit naive, I guess) at how much has changed at that uni and in the job market in general.

I'm still a little surprised at the interview invite, although it is just a conference interview, so I'm not counting my chickens before they're hatched.

[dellaroux]

I think the difference might be in the urgency to publication between the sciences and the humanities. Or some of them, anyway.

I've posted this before (there was a thread about a year or so ago in which this discussion surfaced for a bit, then petered out, I think) but I worked as an EA in a couple of science areas while writing my own humanities stuff up.

The difference in publishing turnaround was on the order of 10-to-1 in some areas. I'm just now getting stuff out on things I started on 20 years ago, which I realize is also true of scientific material, of course, but the difference I noticed was that there was more "hustle" in the sciences, maybe (it seemed to me) because in the background there's more of a "this is new, no-one-knows-this-stuff-yet, let's-be-the-first-on-the-block" feeling in the office when a paper was about to go out (lots of little re-dos on sentences at the last moment, etc.) and the grant-funding machine structure is completely different as well.

I've tried to keep some of that going in my own work, and the ways people linked things together--grant proposal, paper, collegial connections, etc.--makes a huge difference in keeping the momentum going. It's really harder to get people as excited about finishing up something that's been lying around in an archives for a few centuries, there's often a bit of a "yeah, so what?" sense of things, even among those doing the work itself.

There are exceptions--there's a tiny subfield I sort of patch into every now and again that's kept itself active and moving forward, and those folks have a bit of this avidity and collegial sensibility going on, and it's quite refreshing. But the "new discoveries" are still there to be made in their work, or at least some of them are, so that's again part of what fuels it, I think.

There's also less of the "this might help cure cancer" applicability as a meta-level encouragement to urgency in a lot of the humanities, as I see it. One place I worked at was actively advising environmental policy in places where large forests were being decimated by slash-and-burn corporations (not small famers).

The bigwigs in those companies had enough clout with the government to make them say, "Oh, oh, it's serious forest fires! What's causing this smog? What shall we do?" for several weeks when anyone in the area knew what was going on and everyone in the research fields who could do or say anything out-of-country was trying to get them to stop without making an international incident about it (when a plane went down, that sort of pulled them up a bit, too.) 

Those guys' research work got a direct boost (terrible to say) from that situation because of the air quality and weather issues involved.

I do think the things I and others work on in the humanitiies have an equally important potential to make an attitudinal difference in how the world runs itself, but that kind of urgency is less directly felt, I think, perhaps because it's less quantifiable. If by sharing certain kinds of dancework and dance research, people learn to connect more amicably with their bodies and those of others, and stop picking fights with and shooting those "others," that might stop some of the world's violence and warmongering.

But it will be less quantifiable, and no-one will probably figure out what made the difference, if it ever does.

So maybe the issue is also partly that of the quantifiable vs. qualifiable basis for the data shared. (I often have to write myself into the truth I didn't know I saw) I know from seeing both sides that the "quant" thing can also be at least as much art as science, sometimes, but there's a more concrete sense about work in those areas, and journals can track things like that, etc., more directly, too.