Baby Steps

This week Luker tells us to read the last five years of a journal that we would be interested in being published in. I find this idea extremely daunting. Firstly, I don’t know yet what I want my research interest, let alone question to be. I’m not even sure what area I want to focus on. As a Museum Studies student I could be researching anything from collecting human remains to fundraising for non-profits. These topics are covered by very different journals. Even if I did have some notion of what area I wanted to research in, simply deciding which journals to focus on would be a challenge.   

Luker fails to note that almost all journals that we access these days are online in databases. I find that consequently I view articles as stand-alone pieces, and not as part of a larger publication. When we aren’t faced with the physical copy of the journal, I think that we are less likely to peruse the rest of the contents to find the common elements and views. I often find that I don’t pay much attention at all to which journal it is coming from until it is time for footnotes and the bibliography. 

Perhaps the take away from this concept for me is a smaller step than reading five years of one journal – maybe I should start by paying more attention to which journals the articles that I enjoy are coming from and this might help me to narrow down a subject area as well as a potential publication. Baby steps.