Is the journal publishing process and the "game" around journal publishing forcing us to give up on big ideas and instead work on small ideas about trivial matters? We are not so sure. We think that science needs many different types of academics, and they have all sorts of different ideas, big and small, and we need outlets for expressing every single one of them. But outlets, like ideas, are not all equal. Journals are an incremental genre leaning toward rigor and thus risk type-2 errors. Book are an expansive genre learning towards big ideas – and thus risk type-1 errors. So the question is rather what type of scholar you are and whether you can handle the very different processes and mechanisms – those associated with big ideas that take a long time to develop, versus the production of smaller ideas and insights that incrementally push our knowledge forward.

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