In the social sciences, universities increasingly evaluate the output of their researchers by counting the researchers' journal articles in indexed journals. Publications other than journal articles in English are devalued by these practices. However, anthologies and monographs, also in local languages, remain important to many scholars (Edwards 2012). Especially researchers working with non-mainstream methods, such as post-qualitative or art-based research, might seek different venues beyond indexed journals for their research. Consequently, the diversity of scholarly dissemination pathways is rising in some fields, despite the focus on journal publications.

Our four year project on publication processes in the social sciences (FWF- P 35575) shows that researchers are anticipating specific publication venues when they design their research project. Social scientists are required to build a diverse publication portfolio, which may include publications in English-language journals, monographs, anthologies in a non-English language, or visual presentations. Do researchers plan their projects with these requirements in mind? Do they analyze their data in different directions in order to create multiple outcomes that fit multiple pathways of publication?

Simultaneously, some researchers,  or scientific institutions as well as policy makers suggest to reduce the diversity of publishing pathways in favor of English-language journals to make scientists and their outputs comparable by bibliometrics. However, the targeted journals do not include the full diversity of (locally specific) methods and research interests. However, there are scientific methods that are less often published in the targeted journals. Do researchers use other methods in this case?

Further, different forms of dissemination seem to produce (slightly) different findings and a broader variety in dissemination strategies increases scientific knowledge. Epistemological models of research consist of three major components: the research subject, the research object and the method. These three components shall produce a result, which is then disseminated (and is not compromised by this process). Our preliminary findings suggest a different model of research, where the dissemination process is already a part of the production of results. We employ a new materialist perspective (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2002; Haraway, 2010) to support our model. A theory, which assumes that parts of the research process do not exist separately from each other and that research processes do not follow a linear path (from A data collection to B analysis to C publication), but that all these processes run simultaneously and are broken down and rationalized into successive steps after the process happened. If we follow this theory, step C, publishing, would be no longer just the last consequence or appendage of the research, but part of the research process entangled with A and B. Following this theoretical concept we do not consider publication processes as the result of a decision of the researcher, but as a product of the research assemblage, which also includes publication processes. We, therefore, look for specific assemblages, which include individual circumstances, personal preferences, institutional requirements, specific physical environments, specific university policies and environments, economic structures and norms and values of a specific research field. Our findings show how publication practices are embedded into these assemblages. 

We interviewed authors about their research dissemination strategies all over the world, as well as reviewers and editors about their role in the publication process. We track and compare different dissemination pathways and writing styles of specific projects. We analyze how these publication processes are embedded in specific university cultures and career pathways, economic structures and local circumstances. Design: We conduct a New Materialist Ethnography (Schadler 2019), hence we follow a mulit-method research design. Our four year projects consists of a team of Cornelia Schadler (PI) and Nathalie Köbli (Junior Researcher), Teresa Kucera (Junior Researcher), Luisa Leisenheimer (Junior Resaercher) and Mira Achter (Graduate Student). The project is fully funded by the Austrian Science Fund. We conduct interviews with 50 authors that have published in an indexed journal in the last years (recruitment through sampling of specific journals), 10 reviewers and 10 editors of journals and book series. We track publications of 10 projects that published in diverse pathways (public data) and compare the texts. Furthermore, we collect documents on academic writing, from writing instructions of journals to academic writing guides read by the interviewed authors. The data is analyzed according to the analyzing scheme of the New Materialist Ethnography (Schadler 2019), which includes rounds of tagging and referencing until an ethnographic text can be re-built.

Preliminary results suggest that choosing a publication venue is highly contingent and dependent on the specific embeddedness of a scholar. Nevertheless, global norms exist, but they are not always productive. We show when and how (in which assemblages) they are productive. In most situations, publication processes are rather embedded in a variety of personal, individual, structural, and institutional circumstances that produce specific portfolios. We want to share a typology of a few publication assemblages we encountered.

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