Ever look at your favorite economists CV, your own, or make a list of several papers that you want to write? Well I do this all the time, and the one thing that jumps out are the clumps of papers that all look like they’re on the same topic. For example, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the history of Ancient Greece as I am trying to fill out a case study on the rise of prisons as a tool of law enforcement (the Greeks seem to be the first). Now when I make a list of the papers that I want to write I notice that there are several papers on ancient Greece cluttering it up.
At first I was concerned. “Geez! I don’t want to look like some nutcase who only thinks about ancient Greece,” I said to myself. “Not to worry,” said my inner economist, “it’s the rational thing to do.”
When you’re doing qualitative research, you have to read a lot of books and sometime sniff out leads on information that may turn up useless for the focused topic at hand. It’s only natural that you’re going to find a few of those tangential topics to be worthy of their own attention and should be turned into another independent paper. So after you finish what you’re working on, what comes next on the list? In terms of effort writing one of the extra related papers before a whole new research project seems cheaper. What could make them more expensive? If you’re burned out at looking at the same old topic, then the cost of writing yet another paper in the same old area may seem too costly compared to starting fresh somewhere else.
Research that requires investigating topics or fields of study that you don’t know a lot about are likely to spark more extra papers than research areas that you have been hanging around in for a while. These relatively newer areas are going to give off more of those holy cow! moments that keep you wanting to write more and more papers.
Academic CVs might signal more specific things amongst academics than just what a scholar happens to be interested in. Someone with clearly defined chunks of research that fit loosely together under broader methodologies or schools of thought are going to signal that they find a research path and plow through pumping ideas out wherever they go. CVs that have an apparently unrelated hodge podge are going to signal that their author’s have relatively short attention spans or don’t get those holy cow moments very often.