Response to Symposium Reviewers

Abstract

This response to Prof. Lieberman’s essay questions its analogy between “biomedical research” and the academic discipline of political science. Focused on the disanalogy of scope and scale between the two, it takes issue not with the “criterial framework” he offers, but with the quality of argumentation that leads us there. Supplementing the essay’s impressionistic account of editorial practice with evidence drawn from the New England Journal of Medicine and the publishing history of APSA journals since the 1960s, I suggest that the issue here is not simply editorial virtue and professional norms, but differences in the material and institutional bases of the journals’ alternative publication models.