精神慢餐

武夷山

快餐满足了享用不到食堂的上班族的需求，因而很受欢迎，但快餐的营养单一性也是广受诟病的。

JASIST杂志2013年第1期发表了该刊Blaise Cronin主编写的卷首语Slow Food for Thought（精神慢餐）。他倡导“精神慢餐”，我是坚决支持的。

该文转引了美国普林斯顿大学教授、杰出历史学家Anthony Crafton于2010年3月9日写的文章Britain：The Disgrace ofUniversities（英国：大学的耻辱）中的几句话：

慢学术，像慢餐一样，比快餐更深刻，更丰富，更具营养。但是，慢学术需要更长的时间来制作，而且，为了将它制作好，你得雇佣一些不合时宜的怪人，他们坚持以自己的方式来做事。

我在今年7月的维也纳ISSI会议上，向Cronin先生荣获普赖斯奖表示祝贺（照片见http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1557-712700.html）时，顺便告诉他，我很喜欢“精神慢餐”的提法及该提法背后的思想，他稍显得意地问一旁的Sugimoto博士（我在“访奥花絮”一文中提到她，见http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1557-711310.html）“听见了吗？”，Sugimoto回答说，“听着呐”。

原文不长，粘贴如下：

Editorial

Slow Foodfor Thought

I concluded my introduction to Volume 40 of the Annual

Review of Information Science and Technology with the

following observation: “At the risk of sounding like a fogey,

there is something to be said for deliberative writing and

deferred gratification. . . . Perhaps what academia needs now

is a Slow Writing movement akin to the Slow Food, Slow

Cities movement” (Cronin, 2006, p. ix). As I begin my fifth

year as Editor of the Journal of the American Society for

Information Science and Technology, I am even more persuaded

of the need for both up-and-coming as well as established

scholars to take their foot off the accelerator. I am

bothered by a couple of trends in particular. First, the number

of submissions to this (and other journals with which I have

an association) that are manifest derivatives of prior work,

minor extensions of conference presentations, or—worst of

all—(unrevealed)duplicates of previously published work: It

is all too easy to see why the terms salami slicing and least

publishable unit have become regrettable staples of the discourse

on scholarly publication. Second, it seems to me that

rather too many manuscripts are being written in haste, with

insufficient attention being paid to matters of style, grammar,

and bibliographic exactitude. In the scramble to get into print,

corners are being cut with the result that it can sometimes be

difficult to work out exactly what an author is trying to say or

just how reliable or novel the reported findings are. More

generally,the “publish or perish” culture has led to a well documented

and worrisome increase in the rate of retractions

(e.g.,Grieneisen & Zhang, 2012), not least among the most

prestigious scientific journals.

Do scholars and researchers really need to publish so

much so quickly? Is short-term research focused on “hot” or

emerging topics seen as the key to bumping up one’s citation

count,boosting one’s h-index? Is the competition for external

funding and priority so fierce that shoddiness, shortcuts,

and(occasionally) chicanery should each be accepted as a

cost of doing business in the academic world? In recent

years, the demands of promotion and tenure systems have

increased steadily such that junior scholars are now running

like rats on a treadmill. Evidence? The publication lists

and curricula vitae attached to tenure dossiers continue to

lengthen as expectations rise, and not just in the sciences and

social sciences (Cronin & La Barre, 2004). At some point,

the pace of production must surely affect the quality of

what is produced. I am neither a lone nor, I trust, a particularly

dyspeptic voice on this subject. Here’s what the

distinguished historian Anthony Grafton (2010) said: “Slow

scholarship—likeSlow Food—is deeper and richer and

more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to

make, and to do it properly you have to employ eccentric

people who insist on doing things their way” (p. 32). There

are still some engagingly eccentric individuals in our field,

but my sense is that the Taylor-esque demands of our publication

culture so privilege efficiency over efficacy that the

few remaining exemplars of the genus will soon vanish, not

to be replaced. And that would be a great shame.

References

Cronin, B.(2006). Introduction. In B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of

Information Science and Technology (Vol. 40, pp. vi–ix). Medford, NJ:

Information Today.

Cronin,B., & La Barre, K. (2004). Mickey Mouse and Milton: Book

publishing in the humanities. Learned Publishing, 17(2), 85–98.

Grafton,A. (2010, March 9). Britain: The disgrace of the universities [Web

log post].Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/

mar/09/britain-the-disgrace-of-the-universities/

Grieneisen,M.L., & Zhang, M. (2012). A comprehensive survey of

retracted articles from the scholarly literature. PLoS ONE, 7(10),

e44118.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044118

Blaise Cronin

Editor-in-Chief

© 2012ASIS&T • Published online in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com).DOI: 10.1002/asi.22882