International Security

This is an ongoing annoyance for me. I see it as a trend worth noting.

Years ago, academics wrote books for each other and their students. The number of academics, and their books, was limited. In recent years, they’ve begun to write books for the public; these books are cropping up with a distracting element: way too many footnotes. One current book has 185 pages of content and 45 pages of footnotes. That’s just wrong. I gather that it’s because publishing houses and authors are so afraid of charges of plagiarism. Another explanation: academics that can get a book published have gone so far down the road of scholarly writing that they don’t know how else to do it. A less appealing hypothesis is that the writer is reiterating facts and ideas from others too much; leaning too heavily on analysis and research that’s gone before. Given how many people write books these days…that’s not an unlikely explanation. It’s hard to write completely new material. Yet, truly fresh and sound analysis, if not research, would be refreshing.