Below are seven big ideas that you should take from this chapter.

1. Having a body of knowledge is important in any field.

2. Disagreement followed by academic discourse enables a field to evolve.

3. Silencing opposing views results in cognitive inbreeding.

4. Academic journals are essential for disseminating new knowledge and for academic discourse within a field.

5. The process used to get scholarly articles published in an academic journal is much higher than that used to get an article published in a newspaper or magazine.

6. Having a body of knowledge that is shallow and disjointed is not optimal for academic discussions or TV interviews.

7. John Stossel does not know what an academic journal is.