In other words: Did I waste a lot of time?
I don’t think the project I described in a previous post was a waste of time at all — there are two ways in which I think of the project:
- As a form of digital and physical cleaning. I have far fewer journals on my shelves these days (I’m down to about two shelves filled with journals — I had far more when I was at Bethel!). If you don’t look at something, you don’t know what you have… and I felt that when it came to my journals. There were lots of articles that I found that could be profitably used in my classes, and quite a few articles that I had simply forgotten that I had and thought, “This might be good to read again.”
- …Which leads me to the second part of the project. One of the tags I have in EndNote is called “Priority Read.” These are the articles I want to get to sooner rather than later. And I was curious to see how many articles actually fit that description. I think of a colleague of mine who also gets one of the same journals I have, and this colleague was looking at the table of contents the other day while commenting to another colleague, “Nope, no, not interested, nope…”
- So how many of the 6251 articles that I have made the “priority read” cut? 255 out of 6251, or about 4%. In a way, that’s kind of sad… and reflective of the increased number of outlets that are available, no matter the field. Does that mean I’ll only read 255 articles? No, definitely not. But at times, we all have to prioritize, and my priority system includes: Will I teach something about this topic? Will I write something about this topic? Is this something I feel I should know, but don’t know as well as I like? And I download some journal articles that look interesting, but then I find out it’s not related to areas I study. As it turns out, 14 of those articles are in the “read me right away” pile… those that will help me tomorrow or next week in my teaching.
The mere act of going through the abstracts pointed out to me the articles that I already had and didn’t need to research again… so in that sense, it was worth it. It’s also worth it to find out where some of the new directions are in various subfields of communication, even if they’re areas that I don’t teach or research in, because colleagues do. And my databases are a bit tidier…but then there’s one more project to do. I think I’ll wait on that one for a while. 😉