This guest entry is written by Gerald Schneider, who is a professor of international politics at University of Konstanz in Germany. Having recently published an interesting article about the sins of academic writing, in this post he will elaborate on some of the issues linked to research productivity and its linkages to other arenas of communication, both academic and private.

My distinguished co-author Uncle G. and I have recently published an article entitled “How to avoid the seven deadly sins of academic writing” in the journal European Political Science. We have received based on this truly excellent and insightful piece an invitation to contribute a follow-up blog. My alter ego Uncle G. and I have enthusiastically embraced this possibility; you read the results of our deep thinking at this very moment.

Our rambling digressions are based on the observation that an increasing number of scholars do not want to accept the research world as it is – as a constant struggle of authors against the temptations to sin and  as a fierce competition in which, however, the best ideas ultimately win. We believe that a general moral decay in the western world is responsible for the repeated attacks on the holy peer review system and the derisory manner in which unproductive scholars speak of rankings and other excellent measures of academic productivity such as the Hirsch index.

Be that as it may, there are many more sins that hamper our research productivity than the one originally listed in our piece: i) silentium (perfectionism); ii) pigritia (idleness); iii) civilitas (civility); iv) invidia (enviousness); v) procrastinatio (procrastination); vi) inhabilitas (clumsiness); and vii) logorrhoe (verbal diarrhoea).  Readers of this blog should be aware that engaging into one of these sins and other unproductive activities is not only a breach of the academic rules through which you condemn yourself to non-visibility in the long run. Not living up to Uncle G.´s official list of publication virtues also condemns you to the severest punishments that the holy saints of the social sciences have created for you in the academic hell. This arsenal of sanctions includes the necessity to update your Facebook status on a half hourly basis (with the impossibility to employ repetitive wording, like “still burning”) or the obligation to grade each day a 90,000 words long thesis on the national interest of Liechtenstein and San Marino in 1973 in a comparative perspective.

One of the most pertinent overlooked sins is blogging. Scholars who write blogs obviously try to avoid the harshness of the peer review system and to air their half-baked thoughts through a less demanding publication channel than a peer reviewed journal. This modern opportunity creates a public bad of immense proportions as it invites an endless stream of reactions from other colleagues who do not want to live up to the publish or perish reality that even starts to exist in the sleepy European social sciences. Bloggers and their followers should be aware that there is a special place reserved in academic hell for them. In the purgatory, they will have to read and replicate all the thoughts that their fellow bloggists have produced during the last ten years.

You might wonder whether reading such a blog is equally sinful as writing it. Although Uncle G. and I would have liked to meet you in academic hell, there is, unfortunately, still hope for you. In order to avoid the purgatory, you need, to stop reading this blog within the next two seconds. If you have failed to do so (as your reading of this sentence proves, quod erat demonstrandum!), you might want to at least ask Uncle G. for a copy of the article in case your institution has no subscription to European Political Science. Taking our recommendations seriously is in any circumstance a good first step for the salvation of your poor research soul.

Gerald Schneider, University of Konstanz, Germany (Gerald Dot Schneider at uni-konstanz dot de) 

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