Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Documentation, Volume 71, Issue 5.

Carry on speculating (and documenting)

The “Speculations in Documentation” section was introduced in Journal of Documentation (JDOC) in 2004, with the aim of encouraging the publication of material which would allow authors to express new ideas and concepts which would not have the usual extensive empirical or analytical evidence necessary for a JDOC article (Bawden, 2004). Uptake has been rather limited, and so I am taking this opportunity to remind potential authors of the possibility of publishing this kind of material.

The need for this is emphasised by an paper by editorial board member Sturges (2012), in which he argued that much of library and information science research, at all levels, throughout the world, is “dull formulaic and often disgracefully bad” and that “the almost universal lack of inspiration is depressing”. Commenting on this (Bawden, 2013), I was glad to see that he exempted JDOC material from this criticisms, but I felt that we could do even better in providing an imaginative and exciting edge to the discipline. Some years on, I still consider this to be so. JDOC could do better in giving expression to what Sturges identified as what was lacking in much of the library/information literature: openness, unpredictability, making connections, exploring unlikely looking possibilities, and a willingness to stretch, or even break, norms and rules.

The Speculations section should help in this respect. It is not intended for opinion pieces per se; we can offer guest editorials for that, although there is no reason why a Speculations article should not include a personal viewpoint. Rather they are for genuinely novel ideas and concepts, which must be properly worked out and articulated, but need not have the full evidence base for a JDOC research paper. Or could report a study which would not, in itself, be sufficiently novel or interesting for JDOC, but which might have some single point of interest worth putting forward. Or they could draw attention to coverage of a topic in a discipline far removed from the information sciences, putting forward their relevance for our discipline.

I encourage anyone with ideas of this sort to consider our speculations column as a good way to disseminate them.

David Bawden

References

Bawden, D. (2004), “Speculating and evolving in documentation”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 60 No. 1, pp. 7-8

Bawden, D. (2013), “Imagination, exciting mixes and the improvement of information research”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 69 No. 3, pp. 332-333

Sturges, P. (2012), “Imagination in LIS research”, Library and Information Research, Vol. 36 No. 113, pp. 15-23