Need guidance
 

Colleagues,
I am thinking about writing an article on the genesis of a particular weapon.
Do you know any journals dedicated to the history of weapons ( perhaps more specifically, oriental ones)?

I know of Gladius( but it is in Spanish) and Arms and Armour ( Royal Armories).

Any more?
Many thanks.

Hi
Gladius is Spanish, but you can publish in English and French also.
Then for other journals it depends of your topic...
Best,
Kubur

Man at Arms maybe, though they are mostly publishing articles on American and European antique weapons. There really is not a magazine that is focused on Eastern arms and armor.

Teodor

Hi Ariel,
South Asian Studies in London. I dont, however, know how much they have on weapons, so you will have to visit a library to find out.
In 2009 I had an article published there 'Royal Katars of Bundi', so they must, now and again, have articles on weapons.
Jens

I and various people I know have looked into this matter and unfortunately when you give your article to a publication it often will be buried and not seen by most people with an interest in the subject. Your article will be out there but if your intention is to share your knowledge with other people you may end up doing no more than getting your article in a publication were it will languish unread for the most part. You will often loose your ownership as well and some publications require a payment from people who want to read your article which can further limit its readership.

I opted to create articles in Wikipedia on a few subjects which I found were not adequately represented online. There are drawbacks to this method as well but I have found that many more people have an oppertunity to read what I have to share with this method due to the huge internet presence of Wikipedia.

Here are a couple of examples.
Kusari (Japanese mail armor). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusari_...e_mail_armour)
Kura (saddle). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kura_(saddle)

Wikipedia
 

I agree with the Wikipedia idea. Although I have not authored any new articles, I have edited and added to multiple others that were in not so great shape. I think this is good community service precisely because Wikipedia has such a large audience, and it is incumbent on those with the knowledge to improve this public resource. Furthermore, the state of organization of the ethnographic edged weapons material on Wikipedia is poor and could use some high level editing. Even the simple creation of "stub" articles for expansion by others would be beneficial. I know several of you, perhaps many, who have the skill to do this well. I urge everyone on this forum to become familiar with authoring and editing Wikipedia. It is easy and rewarding!

Best,

Dave A.

David I agree with you, besides Wikipedia there is the often overlooked Wikimedia Commons, this is the image data base that people can upload their own personal images to so that anyone can use them. Most Wikipedia images are linked from Wikimedia Commons.

I have personally gone through all of the Japanese armor and weapons related Wikipedia articles, I have added images, text and references as well as creating several new articles. I have also created many of the Japanese arms and Indo-Persian arms and armor categories on Wikimedia Commons.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons is the best, least expensive and easiest way to reach people that I know of and at the same time they are way under utilized.

For dissemination of information (both accurate and inaccurate) Wikipedia is a wonderful vehicle.

However, if one aspires to scholarly writing, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is preferred. If the author can retain publishing rights, it can be reposted in the public domain, or otherwise referenced on the internet...

(I, incidentally, have no such aspirations or ability. :o )

Yes Andrew, this is a very good answer.
If you publish in a scholary journal/magazine it will be mentioned in te bibliography when the article is used - but very few writing for these journals will quote from Wikipedia - which you, no doubt, already know.
As an achademic who has no doubt published a lot of artichels, I wonder why you ask this question?
Jens

Lost? You won't be, after this week's episode of.....

spiral

Andrew, the accuracy of any Wikipedia article depends entirely on the knowledge and research abilities of the people who create and contribute to an article, they can be very scholarly or absolute nonsense. If someone can create a peer reviewed article and retain the rights to use the information contained in it elsewere then that is a good situation all around, but that is not always the case.

"Scholary journal/magazine" etc may not quote from Wikpedia but on the other hand the average person will never read that "scholary journal/magazine" so your information will just be available to a handful of acedamics, this is satisfactory to some people but if you actually want people to read and learn from what you have researched then sometimes compromises are needed.

Some subjects can not really be peer reviewed, if no acedemic has any real knowledge of a certain subject and it has not been researched and published already what will they base their review on. Here is an example, my Wikipedia article on Japanese karuta armor is the only one like it in the world, no book or article explains it better and it is available for anyone to see and use. It provides all the basic information, references and images needed to understand what karuta armor is. If this was published in a "Scholary journal/magazine" no one would see it except a handful of uninterested academics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karuta_(armour)

For the more scholary types academia.edu may be of interest.
https://www.academia.edu/about

Thanks for all your input!

The problem is that our community is so small, that no respectable publisher will invest into a peer-reviewed journal that has no chance of a decent profit.

I recently published a paper on the origin of islamic saber in a Ukrainian journal published by a crazy guy who opened his private collection to the public and managed to corral a bunch of the top-class academicians to the Editorial Board of a journal he funded by himself:-)

He died suddenly and his friends rapidly put together a memorial issue in his honor, myself included. To have a paper in the same issue with Gorelik and Khudyakov is not something that happens every day:-)

But such astonishing people are few and far between.

Real academic weapon researchers publish books, not articles: that's where the money is.

So I am stuck...

Hi Ariel,

I must ask, with the above statement, is it publishing you want or money and fame?

Gavin

Ariel, the above sentence really makes me wonder, how would anyone besides a handful of people ever get to read a paper published in such a manner. No matter how well researched and written your paper is it may as well not exist to the rest of the world.

You are right: that was contributed more out of respect than of vanity:-)

No, I do not seek any financial gains. Having published quite a lot in my field in academic journals, I have never received a penny. On the contrary, I had to pay publication charges. Believe me, I know the rules of the game:-)


Perhaps, I was misunderstood.
Even book authors do not get their money and effort back.
The publishers obviously do: they are in a business mode and calculate how many individual buyers and libraries would get the book.

What I am talking about is that there is no academically-oriented journal dedicated to the field and providing a soapbox for the individual researchers.
It can easily be profitable, because of university libraries that are almost obligated to subscribe and individual subscriptions. The journals routinely charge publication fees. They are not a feeding trough, but a modest revenue source for the publisher.
If anybody has connections in the publishing world, desire and time, it might be reasonably realistic to establish one. And that would be a great service for the entire community and the field of historic arms research as well as a focus of academic endeavours.

Arms and armour is, academically speaking, a tiny and unpopular part of the larger fields it sits in. In many universities, there are no researchers who would be interested in such a journal, so it's far from obvious that such a journal would operate at a profit that would interest commercial publishers. The plethora of "peer-reviewed" (in name only) pay-to-publish open-access online journals doesn't seem to include any such journal.

But your "no" is excessive - there are journals (and you named two yourself: Gladius and Arms & Armour). Not many - I can only think of, in addition to your two, Waffen- und Kostümkunde, Journal of the Arms & Armour Society, and Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries (even more specialised!). There was Journal of the Armour Research Society, but AFAIK, it didn't survive. But you don't need a dedicated journal; relevant papers appear in archaeology, ethnography, history, military history, art history, and metallurgy journals.

The solution to the wide-readership problem mentioned above is to publish in a journal that lets you retain copyright or at least the right to post an eprint online (preferably on 3rd-party servers, rather than just your own or your employer's server).

Thanks for the ideas.