Sphinx

A passing thought, largely as a distraction from the fact that the paper I’m currently supposed to be writing is going absolutely nowhere; the idea is that writing anything may get the creativity flowing, or at least an ability to construct vaguely intelligible sentences… I’ve always felt rather uncomfortable when discussion on the Twitter turns, as it sometimes does, to condemnations of self-citation, because this is something I seem to end up doing quite a lot; not, honestly, as a means of self-promotion or gaming citation indices, but simply in order to supply a reference to discussion of a point or a topic that hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, been discussed elsewhere. Yes, there is an obvious risk that I’ll cite myself just because I’m more familiar with my work, rather than taking the trouble to seek out other relevant material, but in many cases I really don’t think there is anyone else.

It’s a particular hazard, I guess, of my habit of working out a research theme through a whole series of loosely-connected papers, produced over several years for a variety of conferences and other occasions; each one builds on previous ones, which makes more sense than repeating the same material multiple times but does lead to embarrassingly egocentric footnotes and bibliographies. It hadn’t occurred to me until now to think that it might also be rather annoying for readers, to feel forced to wade through a whole series of different pieces of varying degrees of obscurity, rather than being able to satisfy their curiosity with a single substantial article – but if I did that, I would have to turn down a lot more invitations, or – worse – accept invitations and then refuse to participate in the publication. Which would be much less work, but otherwise very uncollegial and ungrateful.

The real problem for me with this approach is that of sequencing; when I want to reference paper A in paper B, but it then appears that A isn’t going to appear in time. The most obvious recent case is the article that was published just this morning, on the idea of frugalitas in Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum and Roman economic thinking, in I Quaderni del Ramo d’Oro (see here). This was originally given as part of a fascinating conference on Roman ideas of frugality, some years ago; a few years later I developed some of the points for another conference paper, and cited the expected publication of the former in the anticipated conference volume. Several years after that, last autumn, already getting a little concerned that B looked as if it might appear before A, I got the news that the reviewers weren’t keen on A and so it wasn’t going to appear at all in the volume, whenever that might eventually appear.

Normally I’d have felt miserable for a few days and then moved on – but the non-appearance of A would create serious problems for B, implying the need for a serious rewrite and expansion of something that was already not too far off the word limit. Thankfully an alternative presented itself, and a less substantial rewrite of A saw it accepted by this online journal of anthropological approaches to classical antiquity – and the fact that it’s online may well mean that this gets noticed more than most of my stuff! The ease of the process suggests that I might take this route for one or two other things that have for different reasons never appeared; not that they will shake the world of scholarship, but they do arguably have at least a few points of interest.

And in the meantime I need to be more cautious about citing my own allegedly forthcoming work, in case it turns out not to be forthcoming after all. It is a bit of a pain, if the only alternatives are then to self-plagiarise by reproducing substantial chunks of material, or to have no reference at all. What I really want to do is imitate the approach of N* N* T*leb, whose recent book Skin in the Game, I happened to notice, abandons traditional citations linked to specific points in the text, and instead has a list of further reading for different themes. This is of course a total pain for a passing Thucydides scholar who thinks that the author’s claim about Thucydides’ views on courage look like complete twaddle but would like to check an exact reference for it – but I don’t imagine for a moment that the author is concerned about the inconvenience of academics who do not have any skin in the game of making lots of money from dramatic but unsupported assertions, as he repeatedly notes. (citation: Skin in the Game, Allen Lane 2018).