A few years ago I wrote to an eminent phonologist noting a small omission in a publicly circulated manuscript of theirs marked “to appear in [major journal]”. They took the suggestion politely. In a follow-up, I asked when the manuscript would appear in [major journal]. They—the eminent phonologist, who I am keeping gender-neutral purely for anonymity—said they had no idea: the paper had been accepted to said major journal with minimal revisions years and years earlier, but they’d never bothered to send in the final version of the manuscript to the editors.
I realize it’s easy to let work, even good work, gather a bit of dusk. I’m guilty of this myself at times and I imagine it happens even more when one is eminent. But what this essay supposes is that it is bad for work, particularly by eminent linguists, to sit in public view without peer review, for years or even indefinitely.
Let me provide an example. I am working on a revision of a squib in which I provide a simple analysis of [phenomenon]. My motivation for interest in [phenomenon] is more or less that I saw a talk, a few years ago, presenting an alternative analysis for [phenomenon] using [bizarre theory]. While I am not ready to say that [bizarre theory] is “completely mad” (as one of my less-eminent colleagues has it), it was promulgated in a manuscript by an eminent phonologist (a different one this time) and that eminent phonologist’s eminent former student. That manuscript has, by now, circulated for a decade without any sort of peer review, but it has racked up hundreds of citations, and while certainly interesting, it raises many, many more questions about [bizarre theory] than it answers. This is a roundabout way to say, then, that [bizarre theory] has at its foundation a paper that would not make it through double-blind peer review in its current sketchy form. That’s not to say that a full explication of [bizarre theory] wouldn’t make it into print, but I suspect a peer-reviewed version would be much more valuable for the field than the decade-old manuscript we actually have.
So to be clear: I think these eminent linguists should just polish up these manuscripts and send them off for peer review. I for one have never had a paper which wasn’t substantially improved by peer review. And in particular, I think it’s borderline unethical for these eminent linguists to treat unpublished manuscripts as good enough for their graduate students to base a dissertation on, for instance, if they’re unwilling to even debate the work with their peers.