Is Setting a Summer Goal Late Cheating?

For most folks, summer starts either with Memorial Day Weekend or with the end of the kids' classes.  My summer is about 1/3 over, as classes end in early April, and grading is done before May.  Which means that my summer is four to four and a half months long.  Yes, I am boasting.  But the reason I raise this is that I had a realization today that this is my first summer really between books in a while.

The Steve and Dave and Phil book project is only getting underway, with much of the work to take place in the years ahead.  I have cleared my schedule of travel with one family vacation ahead and my Euro trips behind me.  Yes, I have a couple of grant/fellowship applications to work on, but I also have an R&R, a contribution to a special issue, another contribution to a different special issue, AND an APSA paper that is going to be submittable by the APSA.  I might even be able to finish a TRIP paper I have been sitting on for more than a year.

So, I am posting this to taunt the reviewer gods:






My goal is to have four articles under review by the end of the summer.  Some folks manage to do that in most years.  I don't think I have had that many pieces in circulation since .... hmmm .... maybe in the year or two before tenure and maybe not even then.

Of course, this may all collapse, and the stuff may all end up burning in the fiery pit known as reviewer #2.  But I am setting my goal today, a bit late, which might be cheating.  But what the heck, there is no rule book as far as I can tell.  And any excuse to post a Queen song works.  

Title My Next Book

The very good news is that my next book has made it past reviewers and editorial board as well as Scylla and Charybdis.  It focuses on what we can learn about how Canada does foreign policy/defence policy/intervention/war from the Afghanistan experience.  Most of the focus is on the politics in Ottawa: parliament, the Prime Minister, the media, public opinion, the tussling among the various government agencies.

The slightly bad news is that the editorial board did not like the title

When the Gloves Dropped: Understanding the Canadian Experience in Afghanistan

Apparently, they didn't like the hockey reference.  So, I am asking my readers for suggestions.  Winning suggestion gets my thanks and a free post here at the Spew.

Book Writing for Academics

Yesterday, I was part of a panel at Carleton organized to provide other profs/students with suggestions about how to get their stuff published in book form.  The Canadian process is different from the American process, so I spent my ten minutes on the lessons I learned from my experiences with American publishers.

What did I say?

• Read stuff for style, not just content.  If you want to know how to write a good book that is publishable, notice the books you like and how they are written, not just what they say. One of the panelists discussed how many different kinds of books there are: dissertations into books, thematic books, big picture books, puzzle books, strings of essays, etc.  And within each kind of book, there are many approaches, so figure out what kind of book you want to write and then emulate (not slavishly imitate) the best.
• This also helps one figure out which presses to pursue--those that publish books that you like, that publish works that are akin to yours.
• Pay attention to the instructions for how to put together a book proposal from a publisher's website.  Yes, really.  Professors are just as bad, if not worse, than their students when it comes to following directions.  But the publishers have formats and standards--do a bit of research and your chances of success increase.
• If you want to crossover (and I am mostly guessing here until I get the sales figures for the new book), then have an introduction that makes the book interesting beyond academic debates.  We start NATO and Afghanistan with a series of vignettes that illustrate some of the dynamics that we seek to explain, including how a pop star prevented World War III.  Really.  Since the intro is free for download at the publisher, it serves as tasty candy (or first hit of a drug) to get people to read the rest.  We also actively sought folks outside of academia to write the blurbs that go on the back of the book.
• I advise my students to do what I did (because I have a lousy imagination and it worked for me) to contact the editor (by name, not Dear Editor) via email with the book proposal and ask to meet at the next major conference.  Do send it at about a month ahead of time as their dance cards get full.  
• Should the book just be an idea or should it be fully formed?  For junior folks especially but for most folks, it should be done or nearly so when you want to engage seriously the editors.  If they like the idea, they may want to see a bit more or they may want to send the entire thing out.  
• As one editor told me, if you get a preliminary contract with a publisher, it only advantages the publisher since they can always drop you if your reviews are not so positive.  But it ties your hands.
• You can approach editors before this and probably should.  You can chat them up at conferences and simply pitch your idea in the 30 second version, and if they are interested, they will ask for more info.  If not, you move on.
• Play the cycle.  That is: if you are junior, get an article or two in the review process, and then work to revise the dissertation.  Writing books is a long term process and sometimes it does not work out so well.  You want articles under review so that there is always stuff in the pipeline while you work on that thing that will eventually emerge.  When the articles come back as rejections or revise and resubmits, return to them, get them revised and resubmitted and then return to the book.
• Self-promote.  I am particularly shameless about this, but publishers have many books to promote and they vary in how well they do it.  My first book did not make it to the display at the major conferences the first year it came out.  That was BAD.  In the 21st century, we have multiple means to promote our stuff.
• Twitter: I tweeted before the book came out and long after about what we found and its relevance for ongoing events.
• Blogging: I blogged a lot about the book.  I even put a page on my blog that contains my "soundtrack" for the book.
• Op-eds: I have written some op-eds related to this--both online and in print.
• Journal article: you don't want to publish too much of the book ahead of time, but publishing one or two articles before the book is done allows you to stake the claim and then ultimately draw an audience.
• Organize talks.  I asked people I knew if they wanted me to speak about my stuff.  Some of those trips I paid for, some I did not.  When I was traveling with my kid to check out universities, I ended up giving talks at Pomona College and UBC on my book. 

I did not say three things that I should have:

• Do not think you are writing a book at any given moment--you are writing a piece of a chapter.  This makes it less daunting.  Pieces can be completed in a day or two, chapters take weeks/months.  A book takes a couple of years probably just to do the writing, especially if you have a day job--professing.  While it does not work for everyone, I strongly believe in outlining the book (the outline can be revised), so that you know what the pieces are, how they fit together.  The risk is that the book feels like a hunk of pieces without connecting glue, but that is something that can be fixed.
• The related/contradictory point is, of course, that as one writes every piece--each chapter, each section, each paragraph, even each sentence--one should be aware of how this fits into the larger book.  If a piece does not fit, if it is included because you learned something that was cool, then drop it and use it in something else.  My most strident piece of advice to all of my students is this: just because you learned something does not mean it belongs.
• Book editors are distinct from journal editors.  once a book editor sends your stuff out for review, they become your ally.  They have invested time and money in your book and want it to succeed.  Most journal editors are looking for reasons to say no as they get so many submissions.  Book reviewers tend to be a bit more positively disposed as well, I have found--looking to help one improve the book rather than serve as a gate keeper.

Good luck!  Not every idea is a book and not every idea is an article.  Figuring out which is which is ... part of the fun.

Lessons Learned While Learning Lessons

I spent the past couple of days at a edited volume workshop in Waterloo, Ontario.  The basic theme is what can Canada learn from its various interventions over the past twenty years for the book series "Canada Among Nations." This is a different kind of edited volume than the first one I edited.  For the previous one, I had to get money from various agencies, ask a friend to serve as co-editor, plan the actual event (location, dinner, etc) and then hustle publishers to find one that would be willing to publish the product.  We ended up with a publisher that likes to charge a lot of money and make money from the libraries that buy the book but otherwise bury the book.  Alas.

This time, it is a book in a series with various arcane rules and practices that I have learned along the way.  Each year NPSIA, my school, selects someone to be the editor.  In the past few years, this effort has been in partnership with a think think--the Centre of International Governance Innovation or CIGI.  CIGI is attached to the Basillie School of International Affairs, which, in turn, is attached to U of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier U.  The partnership means that there was already money attached, a location (at CIGI hq in Waterloo), a publisher (CIGI) and a co-editor.  So, much less of the hard work that was involved in the process. 

What did I learn along the way?

• The new CIGI building is pretty beautiful, and the chairs in the conference room were very comfy (rolled a wee bit too fast--we should have had races). 
• The Delta hotel across the street is very new, has great food (slow service) and a strange option of free bad wifi or you can pay for good wifi. This is strange since Waterloo is supposed to be the Silicon Valley of Canada--CIGI and Basillie were funded by the guy who founded Research in Motion--the Blackberry company.
• That we did a great job of finding contributors.  I chose most but not all of them.  They made for a very good group, as everyone offered very constructive suggestions for each other's papers--the point of the workshop.
• Some noted that the group had a good gender balance--six of the twelve papers  presented were written by a woman or by a team with a man and a woman.  I did not have to do much hard work to make sure that women were will represented as there are plenty of smart women doing interesting work on the general topic.  To be clear, others who put together edited volumes seem to have a "thinner binder full of women" or a limited imagination or whatever and produce books that have only token representation. So, I guess the mix we got was notable even if it should not be.
• Others noted that it was a mixed group in terms of age with both junior and senior scholars.  I was deliberate about that--it just worked out that way since I tend to network down and sideways more than up.   
• That David Welch, who runs the CIGI podcast, is super-smooth.  He hosted me as we conversed about this project as well as my recent and future projects.  It should be going up soon and I will link to it here.
• That it is time for to stop playing the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer bit about Canadian politics. Saying that I don't understand Canadian political practices and institutions because I am new to the country seems to get old after being here for twelve plus years.  I got called on that this week at the workshop.
• I learned that my affection for sauces works better than other ways to talk about some concepts.  When I referred to the shorthand term for Responsibility to Protect via R2P and added -ness to it, well, it created more laughs and distraction than I was aiming for. 
• That arranged marriages can be chock full of surprises.

Oh, and for the actual lessons learned about Canadian interventions?  Still trying to figure that out.

Helpful Review Vs. Not

The boon and bane of our academic enterprise is that we get feedback all the time on our work.  Our work is better for it--that the hack-iest stuff I read is always stuff that is not submitted to any kind of refereeing process and relies instead on editors who seem to be blind to the hack-ness.

The bane is that, well, rejection and criticism can not only delay publication but also hurt feelings.  Today's particular focus is on reviews that focus on stuff that one "should have cited."

I am thinking of this because I got teased today after I griped:

The joy of reviews: so far of the lit I have had to consult, one super helpful piece, the rest not so much.
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) October 18, 2014

@smsaideman name names!!!
— Philippe Lagassé (@pmlagasse) October 18, 2014

@smsaideman Heh. Wasn't looking for a plug. Was just curious of what meets the Saideman helpfulness standard.
— Philippe Lagassé (@pmlagasse) October 18, 2014

What is the Saideman Helpfulness Standard©?  Well, this specific discussion was about the citations a reviewer asked me to include in my work.  I was highly annoyed because I had to spend time reading a bunch of stuff that did not change my outlook or add new information.  I did find thus far one citation that was useful, but the rest were not. 

So, the SHS is this:

• does the recommended citation compel the author to better defend the originality of the argument?  That is, if this argument has been made before, the author should justify why it is worth making again.
• does the citation provide an argument that must be addressed?
• does the citation provide information that the piece (article/book) could use to strengthen the argument?
• does the citation provide information that challenges the arguments of the article/book?

What is the SUS (Saideman Unhelpfulness Standard©)?

• a citation that provides information or arguments that the author has already addressed,
• a citation that is a slightly different version of a piece that is already cited.  For instance, saying that one should cite Saideman and Auerswald 2012 even though the work cites Auerswald and Saideman 2014 (the latter is more comprehensive than the former).  This would make sense if one wants more citations--the former is an article which citation indexes capture well, and the latter is a book.  Why add more cites if the basic argument/info is already included in stuff that is already cited?

What is the SSUS (Saideman Super Unhelpful Standard©)?

• Citations of unpublished works. Yes, the internet is a miracle, but there are limits to one what can do when writing an article.
• Citations of works that come out after the work under review has been submitted for review.  Until we perfect time travel, this is what we call a party foul.  It is perfectly fine for a reviewer to suggest how new work could improve the piece under review, but cannot expect that omitting this newest stuff should be grounds for rejecting the manuscript.
• Citations of the reviewer's work.  Yes, I have sometimes criticized a piece I was reviewing for not citing me, but I always feel awkward about it and only do it when the author(s) are ignoring not just me but a key argument that they should be addressing. 

I am sure I am forgetting stuff that fits into these three categories (is there a fourth category?), so let me know what I am missing, including stuff I should have cited.

The Upside of Malware

I somehow found a link that took me to a site that promised free e-versions of one of my books.  I alerted Columbia U Press, and the folks there told me not to worry.  The place was actually a phishing/malware trap--no actual book to be stolen. 

So, woot?  Folks seeking to get my publications without paying will end up falling into a trap.  Hmmmm. 

As it turns out, Columbia UP has been using a relatively new system and found 32 instances of actual infringements.  Of these, 25 for my first book were removed once Columbia UP contacted the sites.  The "non-responsive" sites for my first book were in Switzerland, Russia and Panama.  The four infringements of For Kin or Country were from one site in China, and they were all removed. 

What to read in these patterns?  That Swiss, Russian, and Panamanian thieves like to peddle books on the IR of secession and don't quit when caught?  That Chinese folks are interested in infringing on irredentism stuff, but are more responsive when caught? 

I don't know how to make sense of this, but found it interesting. 

Quick Take on Academic Publishing Racket

This has been going around this week on twitter:

The basic idea is that academic publishing is far more profitable than most industries because it gets free input (scholars are not paid for publishing articles) and expensive output (high prices for access to these publications).  They now generously let you, as an author, pay to grant open access.  It only costs $3k.  A great business model.

To be clear, I am only bitter about the second part.  I don't expect to be paid for journal articles, and I don't expect to be paid much for my books (unless suddenly they fly off the shelves).  Why not?  Because my job as a professor is to disseminate that which I learn.  It is not just part of the job description but inherent in the entire enterprise.  Indeed, I get money from the government (Canadian, that is) to do the research with an expectation to share it.  The grants these days require knowledge mobilization plans, which includes not just journal articles but blogging, media outreach and more.  But the basic foundation of the academic research enterprise is publishing in peer-reviewed outlets.  So, I am not expecting to get $ for journal articles.

What I would like to see is better access to the outputs.  The fees for access to an article are more than what it costs to buy an average book, and having regular access to an entire line of journals costs more than a transcontinental trip.  The prices are outrageous.  Why?  Because these companies have little competition.  But the more rapacious they become, the more likely it is for alternatives to gain legitimacy.  The alternatives already exist--web-based outlets--but they just need to get more cred from professors, deans and the rest of academia.  I am pretty sure that the academic publishers are maxing out now because they sense the end is near.  The journal publishers cannot complain too much about loss leaders and all the rest as long as their operating profits are through the roof. 

While I prefer for all the gates to go away, I don't expect ungated research to be widely read.  As I have written before, our prof-to-prof communications can use shorthand (jargon) and do strange, boring stuff that is necessary to communicate why we should be believed--explaining methods and such.  But I do strongly prefer for access to be reasonably affordable so that undergrads, grad students, university libraries and other interested parties can engage their curiosity without bankrupting themselves.

When Ignorance Is Bliss, Academic Edition

Dan Nexon, editor of ISQ, is seeking feedback from reviewers about stuff that causes reviewers to see red.  My fave: when people cite an author as saying x when actually x happens to be the argument they are seeking to criticize or challenge.  Sure, I mostly notice it when people cite me wrong, but hey, reading comprehension, people!

Anyhow, this has led to some comments about how knowing more about the reviewing process might just create more anxiety for those submitting articles.  If one has to think about every way in which they might be antagonizing reviewers, then potential submitters might find themselves paralyzed.  That over-thinking, which is an occupational hazard/requirement, might lead to too much thinking about how to get past the reviewers and not enough thinking about the argument/methods/data/findings itself.

There is a basic tension in much of this stuff, and not just article writing but also the job market--that thinking about the game within the game can distract from thinking about the game itself.  One of the problems I have with much of the stuff at Political Science Rumors (aside from the misogyny, racism, and meanness--which can be moderated/deleted) is that the focus is on explaining outcomes that are not about the work.

I get accused of being naive because I tend to think that the work matters, rather than networks, reputation, rankings and all that.  I don't think it is only about the work, but I do think that if more time is spent on doing interesting work and making sure that one writes about it in a way that makes it interesting to others, then one is better off.

Still, there is already much thinking about how to game the review process--that there are beliefs about how to cite people to get the "right" reviewers and avoid the "wrong" ones, that there are many beliefs about the process that are just wrong.*  That more information about how it really works, even if it creates some anxiety, is surely better than ignorance.

* To be clear, I am not referring to the truly awful citation/review gaming stuff that hit the news today. While it is a bit sketchy to cite key people in your first few paragraphs to try to get those people selected to be your reviewer, it is another order of magnitude to create false accounts so that you can review your own stuff.

The problem, of course, with much more difficult job markets and increasing tenure standards is that the stakes are high.  Which means there is far more fear.  And we know what happens when there is more fear:


and yes, I could have used a clip from The Wire "it is all in the game, yo" or something like that but summer is for Star Wars.

To Post or Not To Post

To post or not to post.  To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous plagiarists?  A twitter conversation today turned to a frequently engaged topic: should academics post their papers online before they are published? 

The dangers:

• Plagiarism.  Others may use your ideas, your data, to advance their careers without citing you.
• Review de-blinding.  Article reviewing is supposed to be double blind--the reviewer does not know who is the author, and the author does not know who the reviewer is.  If you post, unscrupulous reviewers can figure out who they are reviewing.

The advantages:

• You get cited earlier and more often if your ideas are more easily accessed.  The twin dangers of academic publication are slow and gated--that it takes a long time to get stuff out and published and that gated journals means that people cannot access your ideas.  But if you put up working papers, then they can get access earlier and they can continue to have access after you submit the final version to a gated outlet.
• Our job is to disseminate our ideas.  That is pretty much one of the defining characteristics of a researching professor.  So, anything that makes it easier to share our "knowledge creation" is a good thing.

I lean heavily on the pro-side of posting.  I have several papers that have decent citation records.  I have not thus far been a victim of plagiarism.  Getting scooped by someone who steals your ideas can absolutely suck, but posting can protect as it can help you stake your claim and prove that your idea is your idea.

As google.scholar has supplanted the social science citation index in many ways, the citation of working papers can help in tenure/promotion/hiring as citation counts are, ahem, cited by those writing tenure letters and those in the committees making the decisions. 

One other risk of posting--you may end up revising your paper in ways that show that your previous paper is wrong.  Ooops.  But that is an acceptable risk.  I have been in two boxes of someone's lit review for having ideas that have evolved (federalism is bad, federalism is good).  Means I am cited twice!

To get back to plagiarism, people can plagiarize your published work as much as your posted work, so it just speeds up the process perhaps.  On the bright side, if people (mostly students) steal your work and there is a suspicion, your uploaded paper makes it easier to document the plagiarism.  I know that via my experiences in dealing with plagiarists.

Thanks to @julia_azari @laiabalcells @kesearles for the conversation today that inspired this post.

I am sure that I have forgotten some key aspects of this stuff, but lunch is calling.

Revise and Regret? Regret and Resubmit?

Nate Jensen has a great piece circulating the interwebs on the pains of academic article publishing.   I am always conflicted about this process.  Lots of people complain about how broken the blind referee process is--that reviewers can be unfair or lazy or incompetent, that editors can be careless, slow, or inconsistent.  That the process takes too long.

I am not in love with the process partly because I review stuff, which I don't want to do, and partly because I get stuff smacked down, which hurts my fragile ego.  But as with democracy and with NATO, it is probably the least bad of the alternatives.

Jensen tells the tale of a piece that won an award for being a great APSA paper and then lists the places that rejected it, some without a chance to revise and resubmit and some after that.  The recent case that comes to my mind is this ISQ piece that Dave Auerswald and I published last year.  It went through a few journals before ISQ agreed to publish it in 2010.  It was frustrating because Afghanistan was going on and on, and stuff might happen that would make our paper "overcome by events."  Or that someone might scoop us and write a better, or at least published, version of our argument.

But a funny thing happened along the way--our article got better and better.  We added more cases (Canada was apparently not sufficiently interesting on its own, but also it was certainly less persuasive than when combined with the French and the German cases).  We significantly improved the theory, and the writing probably got better as well.  So, the process was frustrating but it worked--the paper got better.  And the feedback we received helped us as we revised the book (pre-order now!?).  I am sure the reviews of our book were less painful and our publication process far smoother since we had already been beaten about the head and shoulders by the reviewers at the journals that rejected us (and by the folks who gave us comments at various talks).

The only really dumb thing we were told in the review process was that the article did not really seem to fit International Organization.  That is, our article could have been more about international organizations, but given that the article was about NATO and how it actually operates in wartime, we kind of felt: um, duh.  Otherwise, we got good advice, and we tried to address the criticisms as best we can.

It does not make the process of submitting, revising and resubmitting any less painful--we do not have the thickest of skins.  But knowing that it did improve the work makes it easier to tolerate the slings and arrows of the review process.

Double Blind or Doubly Annoying

Lots of people whine about the refereeing process of academic publications.  For most academics, to be published in a refereed journal or press is pretty much the focus of research efforts.  Refereed journals are seen as having higher standards and thus more prestige than those that just have editors make the decisions.  Grants work usually in a similar process where the committee relies on external reviewers.  Promotion as well depends on external letter writers.

Anyhow, why whine about it?  If you cannot persuade two or three scholars, then why should you expect the piece to persuade readers of the journal where you want the piece placed? 

Well, reviewers often do not read the stuff that closely so they end up asking you to do stuff that you have already addressed.  Or they have their own prejudices and are not willing to simply answer the key question: does this work provide a significant contribution?  Which breaks down into: does it ask a question that has not been answered adequately before, is the theory coherent, are the methods appropriate and well executed, do the findings make sense, etc.

You can get crappy reviewers, of course, as illustrated by this:

H/t to Justin Wolfers who found this in  "A model of lazy banks", by Manove, Padilla, and Pagano, RAND 32(4)]

Of course, often the problem is with oneself: that the reviewers could not discern the brilliance of my argument because I did not make it well enough.  That, of course, the topic is important because, well, it is, damn it! 

I just got back the evaluation of a big grant proposal that did not get funded.  The eval I got was just a score sheet and not with any real comments.  I would hope that the comments would have been useful.  The scoresheet?  Not much at all.

The reality is that being an academic, even a successful one, means a heap of rejection.   Science, social or otherwise, means trying, getting turned down, revising, and revising some more.  Most of the time, when one submits to a journal, one is hoping for a revise and resubmit [R&R].  I have had only one experience where I got an acceptance immediately, and that was for a paper that had been through the R&R process twice at another journal before it got shot down.

If one takes seriously the feedback, the work should improve, even if the feedback is sometimes lame.  My frustration this week is that I really did not get sufficient feedback to improve the grant application to try again.  Still, I will try again.  Oh, and if I got real feedback, I probably would have whined about it, but then I woudl ahve gone ahead with revising with the feedback in mind.

Gated Communities Are Almost Irrelevant

Now that twitterfightclub 2013 is over (my Cinderella story ended yesterday, losing in the finals, as Prince Charming [the voters] chose someone else), it is time to return to my day job (which is actually not my day job) of blogging about stuff that is not TFC. 

One of the topics online and at the ISA has been the gated-ness of academic writings.  Journal articles are almost always behind a paywall so that ordinary folks cannot get at them.  This is likely to change as many folks are now complaining and the threat of ditching academic publishers for the net may force the journal publishers into being responsive.  We are already seeing more journals temporarily providing open access to various articles and issues. 

But, I am afraid, my friends, that is almost entirely irrelevant.  Why?  Because why would any ordinary person want to read a jargon filled hunk of social science?  That is, the academic articles we are produce are indeed intended to be read by other scholars, so paywall or not, these pieces are not accessible. 

I am not advocating that journals and academics change the way articles are written.  Peer review and all that have problems, but I do think we need an intra-poli sci conversation, presenting our research to each other.

What we need to do is provide supplements to that intra-academic discussion so that our work can be digested by those who have not been trained in social science.  Folks should be required to provide, dare I say it, blog posts or something like it to journals when they submit their articles--a less arcane, more transparent, more accessible summary of the research paper that they seek to publish.  Then, when the article gets published in the journal, the journal's website would post the blog post.  Yes, you can see abstracts already but they are too short (750 words is 3x 250 and 5 x 150), and they are not written for non-academic audiences. 

Yes, it would require academics to develop their writing skills so that they can communicate beyond the academy, but most of us are getting public support one way or another.  So, we should be obligated to disseminate. 

The funny thing is that ungating will be easier than my alternative.  Easier to get journal publishers to be threatened by the web and figure out ways to improve access than to get all academics to write 750 words more and in more everyday language.  Even though the latter is far cheaper in $ spent than the former. 

Eggtra-Ordinary!

How are pieces of research like eggs?  Well, I was having a fun conversation with a grad student of mine while we were dining in the aftermath of a workshop on failed states, and I was suggesting a potential research strategy.  The point I was trying to make is that you don't want to waste your research.  At first, I was using bullets--but given our topics, violence, and given that bullets do not degrade over time, eggs made more sense.


The basic idea is that when you do research, you don't always use everything you learn for a particular piece.  Indeed, one of Saideman's rules of dissertations is that just because you learned something does not mean it fits in the dissertation.  Focus is important.  But if you learn stuff along the way that does not go into article x, you should use it for another publication.  Each article or book idea is an egg.  You can do different things with any egg--poach, scramble, omelet, quiche, frittata, use for cookies, french toast, etc.  So, an idea can be prepared in a variety of ways, and you don't want to waste an idea by just leaving it alone and undeveloped.  An egg that just sits around on a shelf is not doing you any good.  Same with a research idea.  You want to get it out.  And, eggs, unlike bullets, will eventually become useless (rotten, smelly, etc.).  So, you can let an idea sit around for a while, but it may eventually become unusable. 


So, you can do a lot of different things with any hunk of knowledge--write a book, write a policy-oriented article, write an academic piece for a journal, blog about it, use it for teaching, whatever.  Just as an egg can be used in a variety of ways.  It depends on what appeals to one's audience.  Making breakfast for oneself is different than making a breakfast for a family and different from making lunch for some friends, and so on.


As I have mentioned before, I am a big believer in portfolio approaches--publishing in a variety of outlets to get ideas across to a variety of audiences, maximizing visibility, impact, ego and also chances for employment, tenure, raises and the rest.  So, it may take some creativity and planning to figure out how to use each idea for optimal impact but it also depends on preferences.  I prefer French Toast to pancakes and waffles, but all are perfectly good uses for eggs.  Just try not to waste any eggs... or ideas.