Every year, a couple of months before I start teaching my final year course, I go right through the reading lists that I will issue to the students. This is quite a big job, as the tasks I give students to undertake - both for an assessed essay and for individual seminars - are quite loose and give them latitude to choose to concentrate on the countries and situations that interest them most as illustrative of general processes operating across Europe. (The course is called 'The Social Geography of Europe'.)
I look at the dates of everything on the list and then, remembering that this year most students will have been born in 1994 or 1995, I scrutinise closely anything published before then: only the most important works (generally of a theoretical nature) survive that cull. I know that when I was a student I was dubious about reading material written before I was born.
I also look at the bibliographies in the essays submitted by last year's students. These often contain interesting materials that I have not discovered for myself. They always need checking, however, both for utility and for the accuracy of student referencing!
And then there is the major task of looking for the latest materials. At one time this involved going along the shelves in the stacks of the library, picking the last year's journals off the shelf and scrutinising them. Now, of course, it is simply a question of getting into the set of electronic journals that the library subscribes to. At this stage I add some articles to my reading lists even though I haven't read them - but I have read the abstract and made a decision on that basis.
So what reflections do I arrive at contrasting this article search process of today with that of, say 20 or 30 years ago when there were no internet possibilities?
1. There has been an explosion in article publishing. Journals which had 3 issues a year in the 1980s have now moved to 12 or even more issues. And some run a long way ahead of themselves: in the first half of December at least two journals I have been perusing on line already have two complete issues for 2016 'published'.
2. Has the quality of articles risen alongside the number? It doesn't appear so to me. Internet searching enables one to identify many cases where authors are publishing effectively the same piece of work in more than one journal. And with the habit of pre-publication (articles being made available on the internet before they are formally published) some journals seem to have a remarkable number of cases of 'article withdrawn' or of corrigenda. This smacks of poor refereeing and editing, but also of the 'rush to publish.'
3. In the areas I am looking for the massive growth in publication has been not been in studies of aggregate data sets and surveys but in qualitative pieces based on a small number of in-depth interviews - and these are often of unusual cases or circumstances. It is a broad generalisation to make, but parts of social science have witnessed a reduction in the interest in taking a broad view of everyday phenomena and instead now concentrate on interesting one-off situations with fewer potential outcomes of policy relevance.
4. Searching of journals not put out by the big commercial publishers has become well-nigh impossible. There are many excellent journals produced under the auspices of national geographical bodies, for example - and often they contain very good articles in English. But subscriptions to these have disappeared as UK libraries have had to pay the ever-rising costs of the 'big bundles' from Elsevier, Wiley and so on. And it is very time consuming to seek the web sites of such journals one by one, and pointless from the point of a student reading list since in many cases articles are not available on line. English has become the dominant language of publication, along with the preponderance of international (mainly UK or US based) publishers, and I regret the loss of diversity this involves.
5. The opening up of China is very clear in the journals I am considering. 20 or 30 years ago there was scarcely any coverage of China at all - now it seems that almost every issue of every journal contains at least one piece on China. And that is much to be welcomed.
I know I could be more systematic in my searches, but I have always revelled in the serendipitous finds from my own methods - even now when they don't involve hours in the bowels of the library. I may be looking for materials for my final year course, but I am often distracted to fascinating articles on other topics. And although I would argue that there is now too much being published of poor quality or utility, there are still some marvellously provocative and thoughtful studies out there. I am sure my students will agree, andI hope they will be impressed when in early February I post up reading lists with a lot of 2015, or even 2016, works referred to.
