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Okay, we've asked questions about authors. Let's now ask questions about the publication. And we hinted at this in the last episode, but here will be more specific. Okay. So here are the questions. First, In what regard? Is the publication held by professionals in the fields? Say that again? In what regard? Is the publication held by professionals in the field? Second question, toward what type of readership? Is the publication aimed? And once more toward what type of readership is the publication aimed? Third question, how long ago was the piece published? How old is it? How contemporary is? Fourth and final question that will ask in this section, what generally is the editorial stance of the publication? Once again, what generally is the editorial stance of the publication? So those are the questions now let's think about what's behind them. Why are we asking these? Well, when assessing the quality of a publication, your first questions ought to address its credibility and audience. So we've thought about credibility for the authors. But have we thought about that for the publications? That's what we're doing now and considering audience along with that, remember, these things can be connected? And the right critical questions can reveal those connections. Take any publication and ask if members of the profession or the academy consider it to be a reputable journal. Aside from reputation, or maybe along with reputation, think about what kind of work it publishes, does it publish scholarly work or something more akin to general interest features? And you can piggyback off of that question to a related one. So thinking about what type of work it publishes, will lead you to thinking about what type of reader the publication is trying to reach? Is it scholars? Or is it something closer to the general public knows these kinds of questions, and answering them more importantly, that can help you determine whether work published in this journal or that magazine or whatever is appropriate or not for inclusion in an essay of your own? When you want to answer these kinds of questions, you should first consult your teacher, they can probably tell you In what regard a particular journal is held by professionals in the field. But be careful here too, you know, because if you're writing a paper about a topic that you can freely choose, like something in the biological sciences, asking your English teacher about some complex topic and biology, maybe wouldn't be the best move. But still, your teacher will be familiar with the world of academic publishing, in general, and at least maybe they could point you in the right direction. Also, if you only want to consult scholarly sources of information, you may want to limit your research to scholarly indexes and databases. Again, your teacher or reference librarian can help you identify these kinds of scholarly reference works. Alright, continuing along this line. Now, we've sort of been riffing off of this. You know, piggybacking from author to publication stance, here talking about questions we can ask about publications. So along those lines, just as individual authors have certain biases or preferences that may influence their writing publications to have certain editorial slants that may influence what they decide to print. And yeah, this can really stir some
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what's the phrase stir the pot ruffle, the feathers rattle the cages of people who would rather not see slants printed and given primacy and, you know, sometimes major publications. Some publications will have definite political or ideological agendas. There's no doubt about it. For example, take like the New Republic and the National Review, two different publications, polar opposite counter positional in their pairing, they're not likely to publish the same article on gun control, for example, that kind of pairing between the new Republican The National Review about a single issue especially which they're antagonistic toward each other on, that's a more extreme example where you see a supply of two different two very different hardline viewpoints. Not being able to pick out heavily slanted viewpoints like those puts you at a very real disadvantage when engaging with any kind of communicative material, especially if it's solely intended to be persuasive, toward a very particular avenue of thought, you know, that that's, that's a situation where individual minds can be won over and essentially made to be suppliants of that very narrow width of thoughts. When your site is reduced to a sliver or a shard, or one dimension. Everything else reduces along with it. And that that is a kind of devastation, an existential devastation that you don't want to find yourself in the midst of. So how can we prevent that? Well, yeah, critical reading, right. At a deeper level, it's the critical eye. But you know, be aware here too, that what I'm telling you now, you should also be critical of, that's just the point, it feels like a catch 22. You know, now that I've introduced this idea of honing your critical eye as part of your critical reading body, you also have to be skeptical of that critical body itself, because the critical body is also subject, but to a higher order of distortion, and a kind of inverted extremism. And that's when we would see narrowness turn into this absolute openness. So maybe everything really is relative. So I'm going to put a cap on this musing for now and get back to the subject matter that's more immediately at hand. So where do we leave off? We left off with talking about how some publications will have definite political or ideological agendas. Now this is true from a different angle, as well. Other publications may exhibit certain methodological biases. So instead of political, or ideological, its methodological, for example, they might prefer to publish only historical studies, or empirical studies or Marxist studies of a topic. These are the kinds of biases that are probably a whole lot less nasty than the other collection of biases that we've gone over those center more on belief, whereas methodological biases, follow certain lines of approach, or if it helps, maybe think of them as preferences and the ways that things are done, the ways that ideas are explored, the way you might develop a thesis or prefer to use certain lenses of theory to read situations through read artifacts of culture or culture live in the flesh, these methodological biases, I would posit to you are less nasty, because they tend to operate off of an already developed understanding that theory and perspective are important, especially the particular perspective or perspectives even that certain theories, when applied can provide to various situations, or what have you. Now, you might be thinking, Well, that just kind of sounds like specialization. Yeah, for the most part it is. So why am I using the word biases here?
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Well, specialization can be made to break bad and become a bias, when it is seen as the only and sole purveyor of truth, the only way into the heart of the matter. This is especially true if other possibilities or ways of approach are outright not considered for the simple fact that they represent different ways through different processes. So what happens when you use a different process? Well, the end result may not be the same. You know, it puts the sanctity of the specializations way of doing things at risk, and the specialist of falling out of favor in their relationship with that methodology. And so to counteract any potential alternative outcomes, the paths that may lead to those alternatives are not considered, in other words, a bias. So how do we how do we find this kind of bias? Well, determining the editorial or methodological slant of a publication can be very difficult, especially if you've not read widely in that field. You know, you may not know a great deal about its principal publications that fields principle publications. So often your best recourse and gathering this type of information is to scan the titles and abstracts of other articles in the journal to determine any potential political or methodological preferences are if you're reading a newspaper or magazine, read the editorials, you know, the editorials will tell you a lot about the stances that are behind the scenes, choosing what gets read what doesn't get read, you know, it's gatekeeping. Essentially, a bias keeps from passing through what it considers to be unauthorized, it prevents unauthorized passage through its gates, across its threshold. I think I could imagine a bias as having some evolutionary benefits, a kind of selective mechanism that would somehow preserve the possibility of survival or extended presence, like, that's a much softer term for survival, extended presence. But I mean, I'm just an English teacher. I'm not an evolutionary biologist. I guess I'll just have to read up on it. Well, that's kind of the point of what we're talking about anyway. So it looks like I ended up at my destination anyway, on the right track, took a different route through it, but you know, still got back to where I needed to be. I feel like I just did a magic trick, but a magic trick of thoughts. I should also say here that a particular periodical having a certain methodological or political slant does not automatically make it any more or less valid a source of information. However, recognizing these preferences should help you read material more skeptically. And remember that is one of the main parts of the critical readers character. True indeed, that it publications biases may affect the content of the articles, it publishes, its authors interpretations of statistics, even the nature of the graphics and illustrations that accompany the text. So what the heck can we do about it, then? I mean, this is getting confusing. It is it is a you know, I don't know what to think anymore. Tell me what to think. All right. Well, if you're thoroughly researching a topic, you can protect yourself from one sided unbalanced treatments of that topic, by gathering information from several different sources.
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So this doesn't mean that you have to throw out or discount all sources that may have some bias present or that you've identified some bias at work in. It's not something to be paranoid about. It's something to be aware of. And if you choose to use one of those sources in your writing, pay it forward and make your reader aware of some bias that you have identified. And if you're not sure that it is bias, or it isn't, you know, beyond talking about this with your teacher, your family, your friends, you could also perhaps let that uncertainty be a visible discussion or something within the body of the article that you write. If not in the final draft, maybe just in a draft. You know, don't forget about what all is made possible by the draft within the space, the active space, the activities base of a draft
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