Looking Ahead: What is Scholarship?

As I look back over my ten years as editor of JAPA, as privileged and enriching an experience as any I have ever had or imagined, my thoughts turn again and again to the question, “What is scholarship?” JAPA is an important scholarly arm of the American Psychoanalytic Association, one of its central aims being to capture, transmit, and preserve the contributions of psychoanalytic thinkers, clinicians, and researchers. How best to do this in these rapidly changing times, especially given transformations in the realm of communication, will occupy the interests and energies of our next editor, Bonnie Litowitz, and her editorial board, much as it has occupied me and the wonderful group of colleagues with whom I have had the privilege of working. Journals are inherently conservative, given the centrality of preserving current contributions for future readers and scholars. How to capture the opportunities and momentum of new developments in communication while maintaining confidence in the scholarly content of the journal requires considering both the rational and the irrational underpinnings of what we mean by scholarship. It also means adjusting to contemporary expectations regarding the rapid availability and exchange of information. The memory of a musty leather armchair, a dim yellow reading light, a glass of port on the side table, and a three-hour, cover-to-cover read of a newly delivered issue of JAPA may stir nostalgia in a few of us but likely will merely amuse or perplex the majority of our current and future readers, who are accustomed to having our civilization's accumulated knowledge available in their handbags or trouser pockets.

I suspect that much of what passes for good scholarship is heavily weighted by comfortably familiar traditions and forms. For example, empirical research papers, including those published in JAPA, are regularly divided into sections, beginning with a statement of the hypotheses tested and emphasis on their relevance, a literature re