March Research Update

Amici et amicae!

Welcome to the first monthly research update.

These updates will normally come out on the first of the month, covering the month just passed, so while this is the March update, I’m going to talk mostly about what I was doing in February. My plan for the basic format here is a brief discussion of what I’ve been doing, and then a short description of a research question or problem in some of my recent work and how I resolved it; a bit of ‘how the history sausage gets made.’ This week, we’re going to start with how academic peer review works.

February was a busy month, but also a short one. As if often the case, I was spinning a few plates this month. One plate, which you have read, was the “Fremen Mirage” series.

In addition, February saw the closing phase of my first scholarly, peer-reviewed article, “Strategy and Cost: Carthaginian Naval Strategy in the First Punic War Reappraised.” I’ll probably chat more about particular bits of this (less of what is in the article – since that’s what reading the article is for - and more about the process that went into the article) over the next couple of months. But in brief, the article tries to estimate the relative cost of the navies of the First Punic War (264-241 BC), the first big war between Rome and Carthage. The war at sea was a huge part of the fighting and was by any standard absolutely massive. I’m taking aim at a common complaint of past scholars that Carthage just didn’t ‘fight hard enough’ by estimating the total cost of the naval commitment between Rome and Carthage and showing that Carthage was committing resources on the same scale as Rome.

Somewhat amusingly, this began as my attempt to show quite the opposite: I had planned to do this approach as part of a larger project (my dissertation) on the assumption that it would come out as the scholarship would have you guess: that Rome vastly outspent Carthage and thus was able to win despite heavy losses. But when I dove into the numbers, that’s not what I found – and one’s argument must always follow the evidence, not the other way around. So it was quite a fortunate instance of being wrong in my hypothesis! But I’ll chat more about that in future updates – for now, I want to talk about the process by which a journal article comes to be: peer review.

For those who aren’t familiar with the peer-review process here is a short version of it: after writing an initial manuscript of the article (which is not a draft, but a polished, ‘final’ version with footnotes and everything), articles for academic journals are submitted to the editors. The editor may either reject the article at that stage (rejection at this stage is called ‘desk rejection’) or send it out to peer reviewers (several other academics in your field with deep knowledge of your topic). Those peer reviewers can either recommend the editors accept (very rare), accept with changes, reject-and-resubmit, or reject the article. The process is double-blind: the peer reviewers do not know who authored the article, and the author does not know who their peer reviewers are, which avoids many issues of bias.

Straight acceptance of a first attempt is quite rare. Articles accepted with changes are accepted on the condition that certain deficiencies be resolved to the editor’s satisfaction. Reject-and-resubmit is very common: the article is rejected, but with the option to revise and submit at a later date (the author gets all of the peer reviewer comments, so they have a good idea of the work that needs doing). Finally, an article might be rejected outright, either at the ‘desk’ phase or the peer review phase, either as unsuitable for the journal (this isn’t what we want) or as ‘unpublishable’ (this isn’t what anyone wants). Rejection rates at top-tier journals are often quite high.

Technically it is up to the editor to make the final decision, but articles are generally only accepted with majority of reviewers. In the sciences, it is common to have many reviewers, but in the humanities, you usually go with two, adding a third of Reviewer I and Reviewer II don’t agree. As a side note, it is common practice to give authors the more positive review first, which is why ‘Reviewer 2’ (as a vindictive, abrasive jerk) is such an academic meme.

To give my article as an example of this process, I finished an initial version of “Strategy and Cost” over the summer and submitted it to Historia (a top-tier journal in my field) in early July. In early August, I received the peer review (which was very fast), which was a reject-and-resubmit with the particular request that I address some Italian-language scholarship more completely. For top-flight humanities scholarship, knowing the English-language literature alone is never enough, though, in my defense, the Italian-language works in question were very new and somewhat obscure.

I revised in August and submitted a fresh manuscript in late august, which then went back into peer review. I then went to work on my other spinning plate, a second article on the Roman adoption of mail (blog followers will note that I presented preliminary findings of that at the SCS/AIA conference this year). I’ll talk to you all more about that project once I have it finished and in review (probably before the end of this semester, if I’m lucky and face no more disruption).

The second round of peer review for “Strategy and Cost” came back again in December with the article being accepted. While technically I could have submitted a final form without any revisions, the reviewer comments were still very useful, so I spent January making some revisions on that basis and submitted the truly final version in early February. I had to reformat some graphs and tables to make things workable for the journal’s typesetters (mid-February) and the got to look over and approve the final proof before the end of the month.

“Strategy and Cost” should appear in Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte later this year (probably towards the end of the year). When I know exactly what issue, I’ll pass that along to you in the monthly update!

The last spinning plate for the month of February, as mentioned, has been my article on the Roman adoption of mail armor and its use in the third and second centuries BCE. This is still early enough along that I don’t want to talk about it to much, since the draft is still very much in flux. But there are actually some neat (at least, I think so) things that went into “Strategy and Cost,” so in the next couple of months as I get ‘Mail from Gaul’ (placeholder name, but I love the pun) all set, I’ll probably also talk more about what went into “Strategy and Cost.”

That’s all for this first update. I am hoping to do future updates as either audio-style podcasts or video-style vlogs once I get familiar with the tech (I’ll need to – my institution is going all-online in response to COVID-19).

Cheers, and thank you for supporting my efforts!