In our May “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
If I have a bunch of shortish, unconnected criticisms to offer for a bunch of new theories in my field, does it make sense to try to put together a paper that goes through them all, instead of trying to beef up each of them and scatter them across different papers?
I’m thinking about a case where some of the points where some of the points can’t be made into papers on their own, either because they are too small, or because they are responses to work in an edited volume or a journal that doesn’t publish response pieces.
This doesn’t seem to me like the sort of thing to try to publish in a single paper, particularly given that the OP mentions they are disconnected criticisms. To me, two possibilities present themselves: (1) publishing short “reply” papers (sometimes called “discussion notes”), and/or (2) trying to publish themselves in a journal that publishes short papers (such as Analysis).
The one risk with spending time on reply papers, though, is that most journals only accept replies to articles that appear in their own pages–in which case, if your reply is rejected, you may be out of luck with it. It’s also not clear to me how often journals like Analysis publish short articles that merely criticize another article (typical Analysis articles seem to me to tend to advance novel original arguments).
What do readers think?
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