But then it should take responsibility to notify readers about errors in its pages.
The article turned out to be the first step toward a major book, so ASR played a gatekeeping role for a much wider reading audience, which is great. I wrote the comment about Goffman’s 2009 ASR article for accountability.
In this post I’ll briefly summarize my comment, then post the ASR editors’ decision letter and reviews. It’s a cumbersome and often combative process, often mixing theoretical with methodological critiques. And it creates a very high hurdle to leap, and a long delay, before the journal can correct itself. The Comments are submitted and reviewed anonymously by peer reviewers just like an article, and then if the Comment is accepted the original author responds (maybe followed by a rejoinder). Instead, they publish Comments (and Replies). To my knowledge ASR has never retracted an article or published an editor’s note explaining how an article, or part of an article, is wrong. You might not realize this, but unlike many scientific journals, except for “errata” notices, which are for typos and editing errors, ASR has no normal way of acknowledging or correcting errors in research. My comment was rejected by the American Sociological Review. And of course about the impact of criminal justice system and over-policing on African Americans, the intended target of her work. This post is about how we deal with errors in our scholarly publishing. As Goffman’s TED Talk passed 1 million views, we have had good conversations about replicability and transparency in research, and about ethics in ethnography. This is about what we can learn from this and other incidents to improve our social science and its contribution to the wider social discourse. In this post I don’t have anything to add about Alice Goffman’s work. My critique of the survey that was part of her research grew into a formal comment ( PDF) submitted to American Sociological Review.When her dissertation was released, I complained about the rationale for the delay.I proposed a rule change for the association, requiring that the winning dissertation be “publicly available through a suitable academic repository by the time of the ASA meeting at which the award is granted.” (The rule change is moving through the process.)
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