how to suddenly realize you’re in narrow subject areas
Subfield 1 Indicators:
1. Your institution’s libraries rank in the top 15 in the nation. (They used to be 4th.)
2. You spend a morning running a bunch of searches.
3. You are disappointed by what you find, so you ask your department’s liason librarian for help. She said “Oh, there’s definitely more than that. I’ll search for you.” Three days letter, you get an email with 10 sources, 7 of which you already found, and a note that says “I was surprised by how little turned up on this.”
4. You repeat the process with your supervising professor, achieving the same results.
5. The closest match seems to be a guy working in Australia.
Subfield 2 Indicators:
1. There appear to be four of you in the world working on this topic. All of the literature on it, which is not a lot, appears to have been written by two of you. Each of you thinks this can’t possibly be the case, and you keep looking for others. One of you has been looking for years.
2. You need an outside fourth for a panel, and so check around again with prominent researchers in your larger field. They all come up blank, or else think that maybe Researcher X might have done some work sort of like that years ago. Closer inspection of CVs reveals that nothing really matches.
I suddenly feel very, very obscure.
Comments
No, you're not obscure. It's job security (and the nature of academia).
:)
Posted by: shelley | February 13, 2006 10:18 PM
It means I’m good to go in my field, and academia. But it means I have comparatively even less to say to the rest of the world. (Come to think of it, Scott and I had a conversation about losing our non-academic circles years ago.)
Posted by: Krista | February 13, 2006 10:24 PM
I don't know. I work in a pretty damned obscure subfield, too, and I have neither job security nor anything to say to non-academics. ;)
But I know how you feel. The first time I went digging around for what I figured would become one of my important texts and learned that it ONLY existed at the British Library, I knew I was in for it....
The nice thing, though, is that you'll get to have fun playing "stump the librarians" every so often.
Posted by: Scott | February 14, 2006 8:42 AM
As others have indicated, it means you're cutting edge ;-).
Yeah, I'm with you on how it makes it increasingly challening to communicate in non-academic circles.
Posted by: Lianzi | February 16, 2006 9:55 PM