In the most recent peer reviewing I have passed one of the reviewers complained that I quote too much and should paraphrase more. The article is 8880 words long and has 30 secondary sources, so on average 1 source for about 300 words, apart from the quotations from the primary source (I quoted from it abundantly as this was Dickens, an author out of copyright). Considering the enormous amount of bibliography on Dickens, I don’t think I quoted too much, at least not in relation to other articles in the same journal, Dickens Quarterly, which I read. In fact, the other reviewer asked me to add one more source to my original list of 29, a common occurrence in peer reviewing.
Like everyone else, besides, I tend to use quotations as short as possible, of a few words rather than one complete sentence, and of a sentence if I can avoid using two. As for paraphrasing, I do not like it that much for fear that I am committing plagiarism, but I use it if I need to quote more than habitual from the same source. This should be limited in fair practice, if you recall, to a reasonable percentage of the total word count, so that quoting 50-100 words out of a 7000-word article is fine, but not at all quoting that much from a 150-word poem. For primary sources within copyright I have been limiting myself to around 400-500 words which is not a lot for a novel between 80 and 120000 words or more.
The funny thing is that reading in the last months plenty of bibliography for a book I am writing I have the same impression as my peer reviewer: we quote too much and use too much bibliography. If I am not wrong, there is an inverse ratio, so that the more sources we quote the shorter the quotations are. In the past, before the 1990s, academic work carried fewer sources and much longer quotations, many of the 50+ word count type which you need to separate from the main body of the text. We have, then, two main problems: there is so much bibliography on everything and anything that an essay (article, chapter) with less than 20 sources seems incomplete. At the same time, making room for 20-30 secondary sources in essays between 6000-8000 words means that we hardly have room to put in a word edgeways. I find myself reading essays in which it takes a long time before I find a tiny nugget of original thinking. Indeed, in some cases it seems as if the text is, rather, a review essay of the kind scientists are fond of, in which they don’t have to contribute anything new but just review the abundant extant bibliography.
So how much is too much? Well, I have given myself the task of writing a book on the representation of masculinities in the 21st-century SF by men, a vast territory. I have managed to convince my publishers that I need 15 chapters, with 17 different authors, in some of which I cover up to nine novels (James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series). So, 42 novels in total. Even if I limit my secondary sources to 25 per chapter, as I am struggling to do, this is a staggering total of 375 entries, plus possibly 25 more for the introduction. My total word count is 95000, with 6300 per chapter, which means that about 350-500 words in each chapter go to the bibliography. I had a similar problem in my previous book, American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film: Up Close Behind the Mask (Routledge 2023), which has 16 chapters with between 2 and 6 documentaries per chapter, and I am, therefore, used to working in this crazy way. Still, the joke is that the bibliographical entries are often longer than the tiny quotations I am using for lack of more room. I am therefore using the most minimalist style you may imagine for the works cited list, and thinking twice before I quote from a source. If I begin with 30, 5 need to go, no matter what.
Funny things do happen. The chapter on The Expanse already has 10 entries in the works cited list only for the novels and the associated short story collection. In that case, and since there is not so much written on Corey’s series, I have added only 10 secondary sources. In the chapter I am currently drafting, on Andy Weir’s The Martian and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, both novels on resilient masculinity in the face of catastrophe, I have a very different problem. As happens, Weir’s rather pedestrian novel has attracted very little academic attention, far less than the film adaptation by Ridley Scott, which means that I have had to use some of it, though I am not discussing the movie. In contrast, there is plenty of bibliography on Zone One, not because it is an outstanding novel (it’s just fine) but because Whitehead is a very good writer who happens to be (fashionably) black and, oh my!, has written a zombie novel despite being a Pulitzer-award winning literary author. If I want to keep my works cited list down to a reasonable 20-22 count minimally balanced between the two novels, I have to reject about half the bibliography on Zone One, but pad up the list of entries on The Martian. This is what I have done because I am paying the same exact attention to each novel and race is not my main issue (it is in academic discussions of Zone One).
In the chapter on Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Heaven, I came across an unexpected problem. Stephenson is known above all for his coinage of the word ‘metaverse’ and his popularization of the word ‘avatar,’ meaning a person’s image in a digital domain, in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. This was published, please note, 27 years before Fall, but it is still generating plenty of bibliography whereas, plainly, only silly scholars like yours truly have attempted to write about the impossible farrago that Fall is. So, I told myself that it would be ok to use the bibliography on Snow Crash and other works by Stevenson only to decide once I read it that my focus would fall on the characterization of Richard ‘Dodge’ Forthrast as a loving uncle. Guess what? There is zilch bibliography on doting uncles, though I did find some on the less wholesome kind, like Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas and so on. I was awfully worried that my 20 plus secondary sources would be all piled up in the introduction and the first section of the chapter, with the second section, on Dodge’s bond with his nieces, remaining quotation-less. I did manage finally to place some quotations in the introductory paragraph of the second section, but it all feels a bit forced.
You are probably asking yourself who are the ‘they’ forcing me to use 25 secondary sources per chapter (or article) and demanding that I use them at nice intervals in my texts rather than piled up in one section. Well, I am one of them, since I demand the same from the texts I peer review: you must use the relevant secondary sources and you need to use them well. If you don’t, you’re guilty of sloppy scholarship (don’t you know how to use the MLA database and Google Scholar…?) or plain laziness (so you do know, but didn’t bother). The other main concern is that without secondary sources, we are writing text commentary rather than argumentative essay. This is not necessarily true (I am certainly arguing a thesis in my segment on Stephenson’s Dodge as a cool uncle), but we are used to the idea that without the crutches that the secondary sources provide we can’t walk. I was told this in the most insulting terms you may imagine by a journal to which I dared submit an article when I was a naïve doctoral student and still believed that the academic world teaches to walk with as few crutches as possible.
When I teach my students how to use secondary sources, I tell them that the whole point is demonstrating that you are entering the debates about a given text at the right point (and not, say, twenty years ago). They must also avoid thinking that their approach is new when 20 other scholars have argued the same thesis before. The problem, I insist, is that the proliferation of bibliography threatens to drown any personal voice. In my posts I quote only when I feel it is necessary, and not because I have to do it. In my academic work, half of what I quote feels genuinely necessary, and the rest an imposition. Let me use Donna Haraway as an example. If I use the word ‘cyborg’ here, I will not necessarily rush to mention Haraway’s theorizing of this figure, but if I mention it in any of my essays I will reference her ”Manifesto for Cyborgs” because if I don’t that feels lazy, or my reviewers might think I’m an ignoramus. I will ask any student who refers to a cyborg in a paper to reference Haraway, for they need to learn who she is and what she said.
I also find that this massive use of secondary sources has a pernicious effect: it takes plenty of time that should be used in thinking about the primary sources analysed. I love the miracle by which the perfect words I need to supplement or support one of my ideas appear in the work of another scholar. Yet, I find myself skimming rather than properly reading some of the secondary sources because they have so much that refers to other sources and that branches out in unhelpful directions. I get anxious that I am wasting my time. In contrast, I often read word by word academic essays that I have approached just for the sake of reading something appealing, and not something I must quote. These are professional matters we never discuss, but I think that plenty of bibliography is read to be milked for quotations rather than to maintain a sustained dialogue. I assume, besides, that we all have the experience of seeing one of our own works cited and feel with dismay ‘oh, my, I worked so hard on this, and they just were interested in that trivial little bit?’ Or even worse: ‘that’s not what I meant’.
Perhaps there should be a journal in which scholars are invited to publish original thoughts without reference to secondary sources, as reviewers do all the time with new books. Perhaps we might add a bibliography to prove that we have read the sources that count, but refrain from quoting from any of them, and see what happens. We might end up with shorter, terser essays, which would be splendid, and with more original criticism, which would be great. Shall we give it a try?