4th May 2013, 12:26 PM
Perhaps a small percentage of commercial funding should be set aside for occasional published sythesis? [perhaps commissioned by HERs?]
I've seen a few valiant attempts in grey lit reports to achieve some wider discussion (have tried it myself), but what's the point when hardly anyone ever reads the things? A distressingly high proportion of 'academic' publication still largely ignores the ever-expanding grey lit universe, even where it's available on-line - the PhD referred to above used a highly selective dataset of a handful of lavishly-published cemeteries located within a huge study area, ignoring the doubtless several thousand 'grey lit' or smaller-published burials of a similar period within the same region. The highly selective nature of the small (and hence often internally conflicting) dataset effectively negated what could potentially have been an important piece of research. On similar lines, the Roman burial population from a small town around here regularly gets referenced in publications - although curiously only that part that was published in one monograph quite a few years back...have never seen a reference connecting them to the not insignificant number of other burials forming part of the same burial-complex that have been excavated in the decade or two since (and some of which are published, albeit only in 'minor' publications, the rest are fully available in grey lit format in the local HER if anyone ever bothered to look).
DBAs should in theory provide occasional up-to-the-minute 'local' syntheses, but unfortunately many (?most) of those are merely regurgitations of HER data and don't really contribute anything new
I've seen a few valiant attempts in grey lit reports to achieve some wider discussion (have tried it myself), but what's the point when hardly anyone ever reads the things? A distressingly high proportion of 'academic' publication still largely ignores the ever-expanding grey lit universe, even where it's available on-line - the PhD referred to above used a highly selective dataset of a handful of lavishly-published cemeteries located within a huge study area, ignoring the doubtless several thousand 'grey lit' or smaller-published burials of a similar period within the same region. The highly selective nature of the small (and hence often internally conflicting) dataset effectively negated what could potentially have been an important piece of research. On similar lines, the Roman burial population from a small town around here regularly gets referenced in publications - although curiously only that part that was published in one monograph quite a few years back...have never seen a reference connecting them to the not insignificant number of other burials forming part of the same burial-complex that have been excavated in the decade or two since (and some of which are published, albeit only in 'minor' publications, the rest are fully available in grey lit format in the local HER if anyone ever bothered to look).
DBAs should in theory provide occasional up-to-the-minute 'local' syntheses, but unfortunately many (?most) of those are merely regurgitations of HER data and don't really contribute anything new