Tag Archives: scandal and anthropology

Why the Peer Review Process Works Even When It Doesn’t

[Savage Minds is pleased to publish this essay by Alan Kaiser as part of our Writers’ Workshop series. Alan is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Evansville. He has published on issues of Roman culture in Spain, urbanism across the Roman empire, and streets as an organizing principle in Roman cities. He is the author of The Urban Dialogue: An Analysis of the Use of Space in the Roman City of Empúries, Spain (British Archaeological Reports, 2000), Roman Urban Street Networks (Routledge, 2009) and Archaeology, Sexism and Scandal: The Long-Suppressed Story of One Woman’s Discoveries and the Man Who Took Credit for Them (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).]

Eleven editors and more than two dozen anonymous reviewers rejected my scholarly article. It documented the scandal I had uncovered that David Robinson, famed excavator of the Greek site of Olynthos, had plagiarized the work of his forgotten graduate student, Mary Ellingson. My article clearly made a number of people uncomfortable as there is an unspoken rule among American archaeologists working in Greece that it is bad form to criticize our intellectual ancestors in print. In the end I did get the story published as a book but that was only because I found an editor at Rowman and Littlefield who was a former student of mine and who was determined to help. This would seem to be a case study in the problems with the peer review system but that would be the wrong conclusion; this blog post seeks to prove that peer review works despite the flaws in the system.

Mary Ellingson #1
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