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(NOTE: I just found that this post was sitting around, not submitted. So here it is) Sometimes scholarly anonymity is not upheld by journals, even if they promise this. A while ago I reviewed a manuscript for Journal A (I am being anonymous here to protect the guilty). The paper in question had a lot of problems and I did not recommend publication. Recently I saw that the paper (presumably a heavily revised version) had been published in Journal B. Then a colleague emailed me with some remarks on the paper, and made an offhand remark that I must have seen the paper and provided help or comments to the authors. But I don't know the authors and had never communicated with them! I checked the paper, and I was indeed thanked in the acknowledgements for my comments. I went back to my original review and confirmed that I had indeed submitted it anonymously (sometimes I sign my reviews, and sometimes not; when I DO sign a review, I make it very clear that I do not want to remain anonymous...

The three-article format for dissertations is becoming more common in archaeology. In my proposal-writing class we cover some professional issues, and students were interested in discussing the 3-article dissertation. I am not an expert here, but I did supervise creation of a policy and guidelines for the three-article thesis in my unit, and I am sitting on committees where students have chosen this option. I found a nice blog post (from 2014) on The Thesis Whisperer, "Thesis by publications? You're joking, right?" (guest post by earth scientist David Alexander). The (many) comments on that post contain many good insights and ideas, and I'll quote a bunch of them below. First, here is a brief summary of our requirements (in SHESC) for a three-article dissertation: The dissertation will consists of an introductory chapter, three article-chapters, a conclusion, and a single bibliography. The paper must be considered publishable by the committee. This includes evaluatio...

When my book At Home with the Aztecs was published last spring, I had an invitation from an organization called "Connect-A-Book" to contribute to their website. The idea was for authors to list several books that were influential in the writing of their book. It sounded interesting, so I prepared some text. Then the company evidently bombed, and the website is gone (but the Twitter account still exists...). It was fun to identify the influences in my thinking, so I decided to put them here. Most of these show the development of my ideas on households and communities, with less attention to the Mesoamerican archaeological context that of course influences most of what I write about in the book. First, the book blurb: The lives of the Aztec people lay buried for five centuries until my excavations in Mexico brought them to light. My wife and I uncovered a remarkable series of prosperous communities composed of families with a high quality of life. At Home with the Aztecs tel...