Notes from the Field | Angel M. Villegas-Cruz, Male, U.S. Full History Professor, and China scholar: The recipe to get published in The Journal of Asian Studies, 2000-2020
Introduction[1]
Collective reckoning does not come around often. However, it was the collective reckoning with institutional racism embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement that sparked a reflection on the role of race in Asian studies in the summer of 2020. In response, a group of scholars submitted a petition urging the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) to “acknowledge publicly that anti-Black racism is an endemic issue in Asian studies” and to take immediate measures to “ameliorate barriers faced by Black scholars in the field of Asian studies and in the academy at large.” The AAS Board of Directors responded by issuing a statement on taking “Action to Build Diversity and Equity in Asian Studies,” and followed this up with a digital dialogue titled “Asian Studies and Black Lives Matter.” More recently, AAS published “Who Is the Asianist?”, a volume of essays that examines the reverberations of the BLM movement as they undulate throughout Asia.
Asian studies scholars ought to create departments, conferences, and journals that reflect the true diversity of the field. But increasing representation depends on a clear understanding of existing inequities. In addition to race, it is important to draw attention to other issues of inequality in the field. An example of this type of work is Diamant and Bender, who find that Liberal arts college faculty are significantly underrepresented in positions of authority in East Asian journals. If editorial inequity exists, it is possible that other biases exist within the field’s journals, such as gender, academic rank, discipline, etc.
While Asianists are doing more and more to recognize systemic inequalities in the field, one vital — but understudied — component we should look at is inequalities in who gets published in Asian studies. This is especially important given the “public or perish” mentality in academia. Scholarly publications play a big role in determining who receives tenure, research funding, and promotions, so it is important to analyze publication patterns: who is writing and about what? Therefore, I analyze publication patterns in Asian studies by using The Journal of Asian Studies (JAS) from 2000 to 2020 as a case study.
Since the field of Asian studies is large and our resources as scholars are limited, I am concentrating on the JAS for a number of reasons. First, it is widely accepted as one of the most authoritative publication venues in Asian studies. It also offers a broad overview of English-language scholarship in the field, as it tends to publish articles from various disciplines and its editorial board consists of scholars from many regions. Finally, the last time JAS publication patterns were examined was in 1973 by Charles O. Hucker, so it is time to explore JAS publication patterns in the last decades.
To be sure, there are certain caveats to choosing JAS as a case study. First, it is a U.S.-based journal, which comes with a number of inherent biases towards the geographic location and institutional affiliation of authors, along with stylistic, formal, and linguistic expectations of submitted manuscripts. As a result, it goes without saying that JAS might not have the same publication patterns as journals in other countries, and that, while offering a broad overview of the field, it does not represent the entire global field of Asian studies.
“The answer may not come as a surprise: the apparent recipe to get published in JAS is to be male, a full history professor at a university in the US, and to study Mainland China.”
Using a combination of hand-coding, computer-assisted text analysis, and web-scraping techniques, I collected and examined data on the authors of peer-reviewed articles published in JAS from 2000 to 2020 (excluding reviews and review essays).[2] The answer may not come as a surprise: the apparent recipe to get published in JAS is to be male, a full history professor at a university in the US, and to study Mainland China.
Data and Methods
To determine this recipe, I acquired meta-data on all articles published in the JAS from 2000 to 2020 through hand-coding and web-scraping. The title and name of the author(s) were extracted from the Cambridge University Press website. Then, I coded the academic institution, academic rank (e.g., assistant professor or associate professor), discipline, and gender of the authors at the time of publication. Using titles, keywords, and abstracts, I also coded each article based on all the geographic areas it studied. The journal issues varied in the level of information they provided about the nature of each article, but it was possible to identify most of these variables, with the exception of gender and discipline.
Author gender was retrieved from departmental websites, personal profiles, news reports, etc. In practice, I’m “imputing” gender because it is implausible to know each authors’ real gender identity. Assessments of article academic discipline were also difficult, as Asian studies combines aspects of literature, history, political science, anthropology, and many other disciplines to study traditional and contemporary societies. Many authors and articles in the field cut across disciplines, so I relied on the author’s departmental affiliation and article’s topic to categorize the article.[3]
Results
Author Gender: males have been the majority of authors published in the journal. As Figure 1 shows, the number of male authors is 414 (60% of all authors), while the number of female authors is 276 (40%). Through the analysis, we can also see a significant gender gap for female authors at nearly every professional rank, except researchers and postdocs (Figure 2). Notably, these are both temporary non-tenure-track positions. The imbalance of published author gender has not changed much over the past two decades. Women have only been the majority of authors in 2009, 2006, and 2004 (Figure 3). For the other years, men made up the higher proportion of authors in the JAS.
Academic affiliation: the National University of Singapore (NUS) has been the most prolific producer of JAS authors, followed by Harvard, UCLA, Stanford, and Columbia (Figure 4). While the visibility of Asian studies scholars outside Anglophone academies has increased in the past decades, a great majority of JAS authors (63% of all authors) have been affiliated with institutions located in the United States (Figure 5). The United Kingdom has been the second most common location of authors’ institutions, followed by Canada, Australia, and Singapore.
Field and Region: the majority of the authors have been historians who study Mainland China. As Figure 6 shows, 288 (42%) of the authors published in the journal have been historians. After history, the two largest disciplines in the JAS have been anthropology and political science. Mainland China has been the most common geographic area of study with a total of 199 articles (29%), followed by India, Japan, and South Korea (Figure 7).[4]
Discussion
There seems to be a recipe for success in publishing in JAS, and the first ingredient is to be male. There has been a gender imbalance for female authors at nearly every professional rank. Of the 210 JAS authors that are full professors, for example, 144 (69%) are men and only 66 (31%) are women. Male associate and assistant professors are also publishing in the JAS at higher rates than their female counterparts.
In terms of the academic career ladder, the gap for female assistant professors is especially consequential, as this is the group most needing publications to advance to tenure. Of the 191 JAS authors that are assistant professors, 114 (60%) are men and only 77 (40%) are women. More research is clearly needed to explain the patterns documented here.[5] In the meantime, gender imbalance in the field’s top journal is a problem for women in the profession because of the indisputable importance attached to publications at all stages, from hiring, to tenure, to promotion decisions. In 2019, women made up 59% of all Asian studies undergraduate degrees awarded at the 5 institutions that graduate the most students in Asian studies.[6] More and more women are seeking degrees and careers in the field, making equal access to the field’s top journal extremely important, indeed, urgent.
The second ingredient of the recipe is to be a full professor at an American university. This may come as no surprise to some given that the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and its publication JAS are based in the United States. Still, a majority of authors coming from American universities complicates AAS’s stated goal of “facilitat[ing] contact and exchange of information between scholars and scholarly organizations in North America interested in Asian studies and those in other countries.” To be sure, the AAS has adopted many measures to promote contact and exchange between scholars outside North America, such as hosting the Asian Studies Conference Japan and the AAS-in-Asia conferences.
The third ingredient in the recipe for publishing in JAS is to be an historian. This is not a new trend. From 1954 to 1966, the most common discipline for JAS authors was history (39%), followed by political science (13%) and sociology (12%) (Hucker, 1973). While the journal claims to be multidisciplinary, historians still represent the majority of authors in the last two decades. The large presence of historians could be explained by the fact that many early-career scholars in the social sciences are encouraged by their departments to publish in their disciplinary journals rather than area studies journals.
The fourth and final ingredient is to study Mainland China. China scholars have historically been one of the largest groups in AAS. From 1954 to 1970, the largest area of interest of the AAS membership was China (Hucker, 1973). While recent information on the area interests of AAS membership is not publicly available, Figure 8 shows a term frequency analysis of the AAS 2022 Annual Conference program that illustrates the lasting presence of China scholars in the field. One of the most common terms associated with a nation-state in AAS 2022 is “China”. Furthermore, there are four regional councils operating within the AAS, namely South Asia, Southeast Asia, China and Inner Asia, and Northeast Asia. Yet, note that China is the only nation-state represented in the regional councils.
A quantitative text analysis of the articles sheds further light on China’s dominance in the journal. Figure 9 plots a network of the geographic areas studied by JAS authors. A network is a representation of a set of units and the relations between them. Thicker, denser colored lines indicate a higher frequency of occurrence. The ticker lines in Figure 9 are all connecting to China, which means China is the most important node in the network of regions studied by JAS authors.
These results might simply reflect the number of scholars that make up the membership of the AAS. But for a multidisciplinary journal that covers from South and Southeast Asia to China, Inner Asia, and Northeast Asia, having a single discipline or geographical region dominating its pages is not ideal. Editors should start thinking about actively prioritizing under-represented disciplines outside history, anthropology, and political science. Similarly, editors can actively prioritize publishing articles about under-represented nation-states outside China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Of course, JAS like any other journal cannot provide full, complete, or equitable representation at every level. However, even if we agree that perfect representation is impossible, that does not mean that we should give up any attempt to try.
Notes
[1] I’m grateful to Jonathan Abel, Kathlene Baldanza, Alice Chersoni, Zachary Clark, Matthew Douthitt, Cassandra Florian, Tashi Namgyal, Casey Tilley, and Shelley Zhou for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. The paper is stronger as result of this collective feedback. All errors remain my own. Interested readers can find the full working paper here.
[2] Note the findings I report stem from an analysis of peer-reviewed articles only, and not book reviews or other essays. It makes sense to focus on articles because book reviews don’t generally carry the same weight towards tenure and promotion as peer-review publications.
[3] Readers interested in the digital humanities can read more about the methods and data in the full working paper.
[4] There is a tendency among many area specialists to divide the history of an area into a “classical” period wholly distinct from the “modern” era. The findings here do not breakdown studies across historical periods for mainly two reasons: (1) I am building upon Hucker (1973) and he did not examine publication patterns across historical periods, and (2) in the social sciences, administrative decisions based on historical periods (e.g., hiring) are not that important compared to other factors, such as country-expertise or methodological approach.
[5] A next step would be to determine whether the JAS is publishing women at rates consistent with women’s presence in the field as a whole. Future studies can do this by comparing the share of women among all authors for the JAS (40%) to the share of all members of the AAS who are women. However, this data is not currently publicly available.
[6] U.S. Department of Education. 2019. “Gender Imbalance for Common Institutions.” National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). https://datausa.io/profile/cip/asian-studies.
Angel M. Villegas-Cruz is a Ph.D. candidate pursuing a dual-title Ph.D. in Political Science and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include Chinese foreign policy, online public diplomacy, text analysis, and digital humanities.
To cite this essay, please the entry suggested below:
Angel M. Villegas-Cruz, “Male, U.S. Full History Professor, and China scholar: The recipe to get published in The Journal of Asian Studies, 2000-2020,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, November 15, 20122; https://doi.org/10.52698/KSEJ3511.