Stephen McGinty
Gatekeepers of Knowledge: Journal Editors in the Sciences and Social Sciences

A mixed review is the best that can be awarded to this inside look at the world of academic journal editors.

McGinty's work is based on personal interviews with 35 scholarly journal editors in the social and natural sciences, a laudable effort that produces some interesting and probably valid insights about how journal editors operate. Readers will learn that:

• Hard work and the love of scholarship (along with tapping into the inner circles of the discipline) leads to building a reputation which, often unexpectedly, leads to being offered an editorship.
• Journal editors have a special talent and personality that allow them to excel where others might falter.
• Some editors are hands-on gatekeepers who actively oversee the process from submission through acceptance to final editing; others are once-removed from daily operations and allow their reviewers to determine acceptances.
• All editors take personal pride in their journal, are sensitive to its financial support and their audience's interest in advancing the discipline.
• Social science editors are likely to be under-budgeted and understaffed in comparison with natural science editors.
• While all journal editors are concerned about the new environment of scholarly publishing on the Internet, some see it as a liberating expressway and others view it as the road to ruin without toll booths.

These and additional insights make McGinty's offering especially worthy reading for current journal editors, editorial board members and academic scholars who aspire to either position. However, the book is far less helpful for scholars who submit their research to journals and expect advice on how to improve their acceptance rate or learn what is happening behind the scenes. Among shortcomings:

• McGinty tries too hard to include theoretical perspectives: Lewin's gatekeeper model and Coser's model of personal networks. These are decent organizing principles but are sometimes counterproductive when the data only loosely support the theories.
• The journal editors interviewed are quoted at length -- far too much length -- and their spoken comments included verbatim are often repetitive and difficult to follow. The author should have edited the quotes to improve reader ease of interpretation.
• Some of the material is repetitive such as the chapters 2 and 4 overlap with chapter 7, which is a "sweep the floor" of editor quotes that didn't quite fit in the two earlier chapters. Actually the same direct quotes are on pages 56 and 122, 57 and 121.
• Some of the author's text material is tedious requiring several paragraphs or a page to relate what amounts to a single-sentence idea. These four criticisms taken together suggest that the work was forced to book length and should be a 60-page monograph instead.
• The chapter on the coming of Internet journals is one of the most interesting in the book, but McGinty fails to tell the reader when he did the interviews with editors. Do these comments about scholarly writing on the Internet come from 1996, 1997 or 1998?

Another difficulty, though not of McGinty's making, is that the 35 journals these editors head are vastly different: established vs. new, discipline leaders vs. neophytes, commercially published vs. society published, paid staffs vs. volunteers, etc. It's hard to derive patterns from such a wide array of journals. Yet one of the strong points is that the author does find patterns in editor outlook and the editorial process.

Reading about the patterns is why McGinty's book will interest the "insiders" and those destined to be insiders. But outsiders beware. There isn't much here that will help you gain admission, especially at the cost and time required to buy and read this book.

McGinty is the collection development librarian at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts.

Review by
GERALD STONE
Southern Illinois University

Stone is professor and director of graduate studies, College of Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Dr. Stone is the founder and nine-year editor of Newspaper Research Journal. He is a past president of TAA.