Library Blog

Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities

Faculty: Browse Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities

RU faculty interested in learning about the submission criteria for quality journals in their scholarly discipline may search in the electronic Cabell’s Directories of Publishing Opportunities database.  These directories feature the following academic categories:  Accounting, Economics & Finance, Management, Marketing, Educational Curriculum & Methods, Educational Psychology & Administration, Educational Technology & Library Science, and Psychology & Psychiatry.

 

To search, just go to the library homepage, and click the ‘Faculty Resources’ link under ‘Library Services’.  Click on the ‘Publishing’ tab, then click on the ‘Cabell’s Publishing Directories’ link.  This will bring you to the webpage for the RU Library’s Cabell’s subscription.  You will see links for the various different Directories.  Select one, using its corresponding radio button, and click the ‘Access, Selected Directory’ button.

You will now see a Directory Search page, where you can choose a specific topic using a drop-down menu.  Scroll through the list until you’ve identified the name of the journal that you’d like to see more information about, and click on “Review” to the left of the title.  A 3- to 4- page PDF document will be displayed.  Information provided is pretty straightforward – a first page shows a table summarizing the journal’s submission process, followed by a set of manuscript guidelines regarding audience, style, article preparation, etc.As a case in point, use the ‘Education Curriculum & Methods’ directory.  Choose the ‘Specific Topic’ of “Foreign Language”.  Now click on ‘Review’ for the “Journal of Second Language Writing”.  Scrolling down, we see a 10% acceptance rate, a 26-30 page manuscript length, and a ‘Submission of Articles’ section.

 

 

An Interview with Professor Jim Cicarelli

Please enjoy this Interview with Professor Jim Cicarelli on the process of writing the book: 

A History of Economic Thought in America:  Mainstreams and Cross-Currents.

Date & Time of Interview:  2pm, Tuesday, January 5, 2010.

 Where did the idea to begin writing the book come from?  I first thought of writing the book years ago, and have been working on it now for five years.  The last comprehensive study of the concept had been done way back in the 1940s, so I thought that a book on this topic needed to be tackled.  Truly, there’s a vacuum out there in the literature.

 How are you partitioning the work between yourself and your co-author, Steven Antler?  I am focusing on the years prior to the 20^th century, while Steve is covering the years from 1900 AD to the present.  Each of us is always talking to the other about what we’re doing, in order to get cross-fertilization of ideas.  Steve teaches part-time in the Economics department at Roosevelt, while I am a full-time professor of Economics.

 I am discovering the process of finding material for America’s early days (to 1899 AD) to be quite complicated.  This is due, in part, to the fact that not only aboriginal Native Americans, but also much of the 18^th and 19^thcentury American citizenry, could not read or write.  In fact, the formal economic writers of these times were usually clergy or journalists, as opposed to the merchants and farmers who were actually engaged in economic dealings.

 Is the overall scope of the research more biographical in nature or does it focus more on  major intellectual schools of thought?  The book will include biographical sketches of selected individuals as side-notes, in order to make the thinkers seem more three-dimensional.  However, it will largely focus on both ‘mainstream’ schools of economics and various right- and left-wing ‘cross-current’ philosophies. The idea of the book is to give a holistic picture of economic thought in the style of ‘you can’t make cloth if all the threads are lying in the same direction’.

 How have you used the Library in doing your background research?  I have used the library extensively to trace the history of ideas, finding it indispensable to my research.  As I have become more proficient in the study of economic anthropology & economic archaeology, I’ve learned about current speculation on preliterate aboriginal economic thought and about how economists have gleaned the economic thought of illiterate European cultures. 

 Will you be writing a few scholarly articles related to this book?   I have produced an article, called “Economic Thought Among American Aboriginals Prior to 1492”, which has been accepted for publication in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

 What are some unique, interesting angles you are pursuing in your writing?  I am trying to make the survey more ‘colorful’ by highlighting aboriginal economics, women economists, and thoughtful commentary on the left & right ‘cross-currents’.  For an aboriginal case study, I find the story of the Cahokia Mounds, located in Collinsville, IL, to be just unbelievably fascinating.  For the feminine angle, I have found that Katharine Coman wrote the lead article in the very first issue of the American Economic Review in 1911.  So right from the get-go, women were contributors to formal economic thinking in America.  More recently, Steve has discovered that the ‘Supply Side’ economic current was actually created by journalists who became highly-influential in American political scene of the 1980s and 1990s, even though they didn’t appear in the major professional economic journals.

 Who are some of the more interesting economic thinkers that you’ve discovered so far? Steve has studied Irving Fisher, a colorful character, the ‘Grandfather of Modern Economics’; John Bates Clark, the ‘Dean of American Economists’; and Frank Knight, a prominent economist of the 1930s and 1940s who hailed from a Central Illinois farm.

 Final Thoughts?  Steve and I are about one-fifth of the way through the first draft.  It’s like building a pyramid, the Suez Canal, the Erie Canal – I can see why people didn’t do this before!

Steven Antler maintains a blog called:  “EconoPundit:  Economic News and Views” .

 

Interview with Prof. Hunt about new book, Blueprint for Disaster

Professor D. Bradford Hunt, Associate Dean of the Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies and Associate Professor of Social Science and Chair of the Department of Professional and Liberal Studies, has published a new book entitled Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. Roosevelt Librarian Jennifer Lau-Bond recently interviewed Professor Hunt about his newest publication.

Why did you want to write a book about public housing in Chicago?

I wanted to find the answers to a deceptively simple question – what went wrong with public housing?  It was clear that something had gone terribly awry, and the answers written by others left me unsatisfied.  Digging into the topic, I found surprising stories about past policy decisions, and these stories added to my desire to write a book.  Finally, it had been over 25 years (1983) since someone had written a history of the Chicago Housing Authority, and it was time to assess its rise and fall. 

Was there a moment when public housing in Chicago went wrong, or was it just doomed from the start?

Public housing in Chicago was never doomed from the start.  But a series of misguided policy decisions put the city’s projects on a downward spiral.  If there was one decision that particularly undermined the program, it was the choice to build projects with a high-proportion of multi-bedroom apartments (i.e. 3-, 4-, and 5-bedroom apartments).  This created an unprecedented density of youth in public housing that made social control by residents difficult.  Read about this in Chapters 5 and 6!

Can you tell us about the types of research you needed to do for this project?

Some of the most important research was done at the Chicago Housing Authority’s archive, which is a collection of file cabinets stored in a poorly-lit warehouse on the far south side.  (The warehouse was in terrible shape, and I had nightmares that it would burn down, turning all that valuable history into ash).  I spent hours poring over files trying to understand the bureaucratic records and the voices, pressures, and policies behind them.  But the material yielded new stories and new information that had not been previously discussed.

Beyond archival work, I also interviewed numerous people engaged in public housing work – everyone from current residents to former executive directors.  The hard part of the topic is that the research phase could have been endless.  I had to stop the research and start the writing – a problem that many students have as well!

In the book, you mention New York City's Housing Authority as an example of a “successful” housing program. Is this the only example of success? What other models exist for public housing projects that are sustainable while still accomplishing their goals?

New York is one of the few large public housing authorities in the U.S. that has not experienced severe problems, though they have had substantial difficulties. (Other relatively successful housing authorities are in St. Paul, Minnesota and, to a lesser extent, Seattle).  Tiny housing authorities in small towns (often in the South) also continue to maintain viable housing developments under the old model.  But for most big cities, the public housing program as developed in the 1930s and expanded in the 1950s did not prove a good method for building affordable housing.

Instead of large-scale projects, we now know that a range of affordable housing options should be offered in every city.  Some families simply need an income subsidy and are fine; the federal Housing Choice Voucher program works for them.  Other groups, like single men, are often best served in new Single Residency Occupancy developments.  And some need what we call “Supportive Housing,” especially for families suffering from severe problems like addiction and mental illness.  Supportive Housing is often subsidized by government but managed by non-profit social service agencies who have the knowledge to help those most in need.  

The main point here is that there is no one-size-fits-all housing program that can work.  The “affordable housing problem” is highly fractured and complicated, and it requires numerous small-scale solutions.

What were the best and worst parts of the writing/publishing experience?

 The best and worst part about writing and publishing Blueprint for Disaster was that the work was incredibly challenging.  Some days I craved that challenge; other days I wish the book were done.   But the challenge was clearly the driving force.  I had to wrestle with questions that all historians ask themselves:  how am I going to explain what happened?  How am I going to be fair to the people and organizations of the past?  How am I going to make this history relevant?  Those are hard questions to answer. 

Just as in any student research paper, I had to make sure that each paragraph was focused on moving the story forward.  There was no room for “fluff” in this book, and the editors made sure that I “drove a narrative” in my writing.  Fortunately, I had a lot of help not only from my editors but from many volunteer readers of the manuscript, including my Mother, a former English teacher.  She’s my secret weapon!  Thanks Mom!

 

• To purchase a copy of the book, click here.
• To locate a copy of the book in the RU Library, click here.
• To read a review of the book from the August 15, 2009 Chicago Tribune, click here (requires authentication with RU Library borrower ID).
• To read an article about the book and Chicago Public Housing from the Chicago Reader, click here.

Library Instruction Sessions – An Interview with Instructor Jan Bone

Please enjoy this brief interview with adjunct Professor Jan Bone regarding her experiences with library instruction sessions in support of her English 102 class.

Q:  Professor Bone, how long have you had students taking English 102 come by the library for library instruction classes?

A:  I’ve been teaching English 102 (Argument/Analysis/Research) since the 1990s.  I can’t imagine not incorporating library instruction classes into their coursework for this class.  The librarians give these students, many of whom are second-semester freshmen, excellent groundwork for research—not just in the traditional databases, but also in where to look for resources that the average student might not think about. Everyone in my 102 classes comes to the library for these sessions.

Q:  Please comment on the ways in which the library instruction sessions that your English classes have participated in have helped your students use better quality articles in order produce more scholarly research papers…

A:  If we assume (as I do) that timely, appropriate, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal articles not only raise the quality of the research papers, but also acquaint the writers with content-specific knowledge, then the library instruction sessions get a 4.0 on my grading scale.

     Much of the reason for that is the close cooperation we, as a class and writing community, build with the library and librarians. Usually two months before a semester starts, I not only schedule library instruction, but also discuss with the librarians the text students will use, as well as the major themes and assignments.

     Before the semester crunch starts, then, the librarians are familiar with what my students in each of the two sections will be doing. I add the librarians to our Blackboard site, so that before students come in for instruction, the librarians can log on and see the topics the students have picked for their papers…student by student.

     Joe Davis and Laura McLoughlin, Schaumburg research librarians, use that list to plan essentially targeted, customized library instruction. They prepare in advance an outline of what the sessions will cover, emphasizing the appropriate academic databases best for locating the information students can best use for their specific topics. At the sessions, Joe or Laura show students how to get into those databases, how to use them, how to get keywords, and how to do Boolean searches to pinpoint pertinent information. They also lead the class in hands-on demos that give students practice in e-mailing the selected articles to their student accounts along with the appropriate citation style for that discipline—usually MLA or APA, depending on the paper’s topic.

Q:  Recently, with your first English 102 project, the class wrote papers on the topic of “How do I plan to keep my job from being outsourced?” by gleaning ideas from the book The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.  What changes did you make in teaching the class this past Spring?

A:  My Spring ’09 English 102 classes used, as their main text, Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman’s 2008 book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Revitalize America.  Student partners chose research topics for spinoffs, including wind, solar, biodiesel, auto industry, India, China and Southeast Asia, retrofitting buildings, and paying for energy efficiency.

     Joe and Laura had taken those topics, and besides scholarly journals, showed students how to use resources like Mediamark Reporter, GreenFile, and Encyclopedia of Associations to  locate statistics and industry experts to contact.

     On February 18, the class hosted a speakerphone interview with Washington D.C.-based energy expert, Ben Goldstein, of the Center for American Progress.  The CAP is a policy think-tank that has been recommending energy-efficiency initiatives to President Obama.  Students in both sections wrote interview questions and forwarded them to Ben, who had given students two significant articles he’d published to read before the interview.  Ben had been impressed by the excellence of the students’ questions.  Our thanks go to the Dean of the Schaumburg Campus, Antonia Potenza, for letting us use the Tucker Board Room for the interview, providing the speakerphone, and covering the phone bill!

Thank you, Jan.  For further information regarding Jan’s English 102 classes see the March 20, 2006 Chicago Daily Herald article, Preparing for the future:  Teacher adapts style to suit needs - of her students  by Eric Peterson.

Prof. Gina Buccola discusses her new book, Conjuring

Associate Professor of English, Gina Buccola has a chapbook of poetry being released this spring from Finishing Line Press. I was able to sit down with her to ask her about her creative process, what role research plays in her writing, her inspiration, and advice to creative writing students.

Martinique: You have published a few other books recently that are all heavily researched non-fiction works, is this your first creative publication?

Gina: Yes, of book-length. I have published some individual poems in regional journals. “Conjuring” (the poem which shares its title with the collection) was published in the Journal of Kentucky Studies. 

Martinique: Can you say more about how the title of that poem came to share its name with the collection?

Gina: I do write a lot about women, but that poem is not about women or witchcraft in the sense of conjuring in witchcraft, but about a former professor of mine who was the Poet Laureate of Kentucky. I was asked to write a poem for his instantiation. James Baker Hall was a professor of mine in college and had this amazing ability to memorize poems. Sometimes in class he would recite a poem and he would just sort of close his eyes and sometimes hold out his hand in this way that it was like he was pulling poems out of the air. 

Martinique: Your other academic publications required an extensive amount of research, is there any research involved in the process of creating your poetry?

Gina: My teaching and academic work can really tax my creative ability. It is often difficult to switch gears from that type of work to creative work. It often feels literally like that ‘clunk’ you get when you’re driving a stick shift and you switch gears and the whole car responds. So I take inspiration where I can find it and a lot of these poems are inspired by research I was doing for other projects.

 Many of the poems are imaginative biographies of notable women. For example, I was watching a documentary about Mata Hari and I had no idea that she did espionage work in the war. She really used her persona for spying, and I took that story and wrote one of the poems in this collection about her. Some of the poems aren’t imaginative biographies about specific women either but based on imagined women. For example as a graduate student I was looking at lots and lots of rolls of microfilm of newspaper stories all day as I was doing research on literacy in that time period for a professor. I came across information about the suffragettes in Appalachia and invented a character who is the subject of another poem.

So the research is very different from conventional academic research because I draw from that research, but I’m not really researching and documenting or foot-noting in my creative writing.

Martinique: Most of your published work and the classes you teach here at Roosevelt are about the early modern era, British literature and Shakespeare. Is there any connection between your academic work and your creative work?

            "We have an embarrassment of riches in Chicago with the opportunities to hear other writers"

Gina: Not really, I think of them as very separate. But I have started work on a novel that takes place now but is a bout a researcher engaged with Shakespeare – there is this whole genre of Shakespeare detective novels. This is my first time putting these two areas of my work together. The novel draws parallels between the main characters and Shakespeare’s characters. I did begin this novel as sort of an escape from research work I was doing last summer where I was reading handwritten seventeenth century manuscripts all day, which was exhausting and this was sort of an escape from that.

Martinique: Who are some of your favorite poets and why?

Gina: I have written about some of my favorites in these poems. Dorothy Parker is one. It's wit that I love; the way she undercuts convention and has a really shocking last line in her poems. Sylvia Plath, too, she tends to go in and out of fashion but I still think her work is really important from a feminist point of view. She really dealt with a lot of issues that women faced and pulled the lid of some of these issues.

 Their style may not have an apparent affect on me,
but what they do with their poetry is interesting.

I am really drawn to artists whose works change things socially because I still believe that art can do that. Adrienne Rich is one of these poets. She really documented her personal journey as an out lesbian. I saw her read years ago at the Chicago Cultural Center. She was in this room where there were pictures of all these male poets up high on the walls and she made this comment that I wish I remember, something about ‘look at all the men up there, but it’s a woman down here people came to see read’. Those kinds of interventions are really valuable.

So, with my favorite poets, their style may not have an apparent affect on me, but what they do with their poetry is interesting.

Martinique: How long have you been working on the poems in Conjuring?

Gina:I wrote some of these poems as much as eighteen years ago. I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid.  I don’t have an MFA, but I’ve always taken poetry workshops, so I’ve formally studied poetry which I think is important to do.  The workshop environment is important because our culture really relegates poetry to hobby status but the workshop environment forces you to prioritize your writing.

Martinique: What advice do you have for students who are also creative writers and would like to get a book of their own poems, or a novel published one day?

Gina: I would say take creative writing workshops. When you participate in these workshops you become a part of a community of writers that will move forward in time. For example, Maurice Manning, who won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2001 wrote a blurb about my book and he was someone I was in writing workshops with years ago. Incidentally, he is also another one of the poets whose work really interests me.

I know Janet Wondra tells her students this (and I agree): submit your work regularly. Always be on the outlook for places you can send your work and as soon as you get a rejection from somewhere, and you will get rejections, just take it out, put it in a new envelope and send it off. Of course if they suggest changes or you want to rework it you can do that too before sending it off.

Also, read a lot, and go to a lot of readings. We have an embarrassment of riches in Chicago with the opportunities to hear other writers. You have a great opportunity to learn when you hear another author read their work, and there is often a Q and A where you can ask questions of that writer, too.

I also think it is a good idea to keep a journal – even if it’s just on your pda or something. I’ve written poems from something I started or a note I made years before. Sometimes you have much more to bring to these notes much later.

• To buy a copy or Professor Buccola’s book, click here.
• Look for a copy of her book in the Roosevelt Library this spring.
• Learn more about the poets that Prof. Buccola discusses here (look for Articles or Online Reference Sources).

Spotlight on RU Faculty Publications: Stephen Ziliak

David Pribyl, Head of Technical Services at the Roosevelt University Library, recently interviewed Stephen Zillak about his latest publication:

Stephen Ziliak, RU Professor of Economics, has published a new book, copies of which are available in the library: The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (University of Michigan Press, 2008).  By Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey.  David Pribyl, liaison with the economics faculty and Head of Technical Services in the library, interviewed Ziliak, known as "Prof Z."

RU: How, if at all, can a book on statistics deal with issues of social justice?

Prof Z: Good question! For years, I, like most people, did not see any connection at all between statistics and social justice, or, to say it more generally, between statistics and ethics.  It wasn't until 1989 - while working at the Indiana Department of Workforce Development - that I saw for the first time how deeply human the seemingly arcane & "objective" world of statistics is. 

I worked in the Labor Market Information Division, where the official state & regional labor force statistics are generated and disseminated in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Labor.  One day a citizen telephoned. He asked me to provide unemployment rate statistics for black youth in each of Indiana's major cities.  Young men and women between the ages of 16 and 21. I couldn't find the statistics he asked for.  Now Indianapolis, Gary, Fort Wayne, Evansville had then as now tragically high amounts of minority unemployment - and very high for young African American men in particular.  No one would be surprised if the average city rate exceeded 35 or 40% while the national rate - for the whole economy - was only around 5%.  So where were the statistics proving it? 

Finally I went to the chief of my division.  He made a phone call to the Chicago branch of the U.S. Department of Labor, to a chief who was next in line in the chain of command.  The chief in Chicago replied "given the lack of statistical significance in the black youth unemployment rates, the Department of Labor does not disseminate those rates.  We don't publish statistically insignificant results, only 'significant' results," he said.   I was embarrassed to return to the telephone to tell the citizen what I learned.   

What the Labor Department was saying is that if a rate is not estimated with an arbitrary amount of precision then they won't publish or disseminate it.  In technical terms, the p-value had to be equal or less than .10.  This standard they glue  to even if other evidence suggests that the rate is so high as to constitute what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "Great Depression in the economy of the ghetto."  It was a life-changing experience for me.  I realized that important social issues get pushed under the rug for pseudo-scientific reasons.  But as I show in The Cult very few scientists have had this kind of realization.  That precision is not the end all be all of human decision making.  Like most members of the cult of statistical significance, the DOL economists and statisticians - my friends & former bosses - do not possess or implement a scientifically legitimate or socially just decision rule.  Zero, nil, null, nothing.  It has to change.