(Or how to bury your work so deeply that no-one will ever know it existed in the first place!)
If there’s one piece of advice I’d give myself as a young researcher, it would probably be “never agree to write a book chapter!”
Of course, there are plenty of good academic book chapters around. But over the years I’ve sadly come to realize that this is the fastest way to make my work inaccessible to people who might otherwise benefit from it — partly because academic books are so expensive that few people can afford to read them!
However, I’ve just come across an even more effective way of ensuring no-one has a hope in hell of benefiting from your research: publishing a chapter in a book which is then dropped from subsequent editions.
This takes the adage of “the best way to bury your research is to put it in a book chapter” to the next level, as once the new edition of a book comes out sans your contribution, people can’t read it, even if they want to!
This is the situation I found myself in this weekend. Browsing through some of my archives from over a decade ago, I stumbled across a chapter I’d written with my colleague Paul Baron for the 2005 CRC Aerosols Handbook on Aerosols in the Industrial Environment. To most readers, the chapter would probably not be that interesting. But what we published was an extremely comprehensive survey of aerosol sampling equipment for use in occupational health research, complete with photos of most instruments from our lab at the time.
This was never going to be a best seller — from what I can tell, the chapter has never been cited (of course not – no-one reads book chapters!) — but it does include important information on aerosol sampling for anyone who has an interest in aerosol exposure measurements.
Out of curiosity, I checked online to see if the book is still available, and discovered it is now in its second edition … and our chapter is no longer in it!
Of course, there are many reasons why this is the case, including the likelihood that the editors didn’t manage to track me down for the second edition, or that I had too much on my plate at the time to update the chapter (I don’t recall). But the end result is the same — hundreds of hours surveying the cutting edge of occupational aerosol measurement and writing about it for others to benefit from down the drain, because no-one can find or access the chapter any more …
… up to now!
I don’t think I ever received a final copy of the book, or a final digital version of the chapter. But I did find a copy of the final proofs. And so, in the interest of making all that work count for something, here is that chapter:
Enjoy 😊
