Executive Summary
This paper addresses the academic infrastructure required to sustain neglect studies as a field: the institutional homes within universities, the publication outlets through which findings circulate and accumulate, the conferences at which scholars meet, and the curricula through which the next generation is trained. The paper proceeds from the premise that intellectual fields do not consolidate without institutional scaffolding, and that the work of designing that scaffolding deliberately, before the field is established, allows choices to be made that would be difficult to reverse later.
The paper develops five proposals. The first is a model for hosting the field within universities that resists capture by any single discipline while providing the stability of an institutional home. The second is a flagship peer-reviewed journal with a specific editorial design suited to the field’s methodological pluralism and tiered evidence standard. The third is a set of companion publication outlets — a registry of neglected questions, a journal of negative results and abandoned programs, and a stocktaking review series — that together address publication needs the flagship cannot meet alone. The fourth is a conference and meeting structure designed to prevent the field from being colonized by any one of its parent disciplines. The fifth is a curriculum framework for doctoral and master’s training that combines methodological breadth with substantive grounding in at least one host discipline.
The paper concludes with a discussion of the sequencing of these elements and the institutions best positioned to host the first instances of each.
1. Introduction
The preface and the first two papers in this series have argued that neglect studies is intellectually warranted and methodologically tractable. Neither argument settles the practical question of where the field will live. Intellectual fields do not exist as disembodied bodies of inquiry; they exist as networks of departments, journals, conferences, training programs, and professional associations, and the choices made in establishing those structures shape what the field becomes. A field hosted within a single discipline will tend to take on that discipline’s questions and methods. A field that lacks a flagship journal will find its work scattered across outlets that index it inconsistently and to which neither newcomers nor outside observers can easily navigate. A field without doctoral training programs will depend on scholars whose primary identification lies elsewhere and whose long-term career incentives pull them away from sustained engagement.
The argument of this paper is that the institutional infrastructure for neglect studies should be designed deliberately rather than allowed to develop by accretion. Deliberate design has costs — it requires founding effort that accretion does not, and it requires choices to be made before all the relevant considerations are clear — but it has the corresponding benefit of allowing the field to avoid path dependencies that would be difficult to reverse later. The deliberate-design argument is particularly strong for a field whose distinctive feature is methodological pluralism, since a field that develops by accretion within a single discipline will not preserve the pluralism that justifies its existence.
Three design principles run through the proposals that follow. The first is cross-disciplinary integrity, meaning that the field’s institutions should be structured to prevent capture by any single parent discipline while remaining hospitable to scholars trained in many different ones. The second is methodological seriousness, meaning that the institutions should embody the tiered standard of evidence proposed in Paper 2 rather than relaxing it under the pressure of producing rapid outputs. The third is long-term sustainability, meaning that the institutions should be designed with their funding model, governance, and renewal mechanisms in view from the outset, rather than being constructed as expressions of present enthusiasm that lack durable foundations.
2. Hosting Models for Universities
The question of where neglect studies should live within universities admits several distinct answers, each with its own trade-offs. The four models considered below are not mutually exclusive, and a mature field would probably include instances of several of them. The discussion identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each and proposes which should be prioritized in the field’s founding period.
2.1 The Dedicated Center Model
A dedicated center for neglect studies — typically a small interdisciplinary unit with a director, a handful of core faculty appointments or affiliations, and a budget for fellowships, workshops, and research projects — is the most visible institutional form a new field can take. Centers of this kind exist for many emerging interdisciplinary subjects and have a well-understood operating logic.
The strengths of the center model are several. A center provides a physical and administrative home for the field, a budget line that can be defended in institutional politics, a visible point of contact for external partners, and a venue for the gathering of scholars who would otherwise be scattered across departments. A well-resourced center can also support fellowship programs that bring scholars from other institutions for sustained engagement, which is one of the most effective mechanisms for building a field’s professional community.
The weaknesses are also substantial. Centers are vulnerable to changes in institutional priorities, particularly when their founding directors retire or move. Centers without tenure-line appointments depend on faculty whose primary obligations are to their home departments, which limits the depth of engagement the center can command. Centers funded primarily by external grants are vulnerable to changes in funding climate. And centers can become professionally insular if their staff comes to identify primarily with the center rather than with the wider scholarly community.
The recommendation for neglect studies is that the field should aim for two or three founding centers in the first decade, placed in institutions where senior scholars have committed to the field’s development, where the surrounding institutional environment is hospitable to interdisciplinary work, and where the funding model includes both internal university support and external grants in a balance that does not leave the center dependent on any single source.
2.2 The School-of-Advanced-Study Model
A more ambitious version of the center model is the school of advanced study, exemplified by institutions like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and several similar bodies internationally. Such institutions support scholarship through residential fellowships and do not have undergraduate or doctoral teaching responsibilities. They allow concentrated periods of work on questions that would not fit comfortably within departmental structures.
For neglect studies, the school-of-advanced-study model is attractive in principle but probably premature in practice. The model works best for fields that have already produced a substantial community of established scholars, since the fellowship pool requires a base of senior researchers from which to draw. Neglect studies does not yet have such a base, and the school-of-advanced-study model is more plausibly a destination for the field after a decade or two of development than a founding institution.
A modified version of the model — a residential fellowship program affiliated with one of the founding centers, supporting one-year stays by scholars from other institutions — is more tractable in the near term and would serve some of the same purposes.
2.3 The Distributed Network Model
The distributed network model treats the field as a virtual community whose members maintain primary affiliations in their home departments and who collaborate through periodic meetings, joint publication outlets, and online infrastructure. Several emerging fields have followed this model, particularly during their early years before institutional resources for dedicated homes became available.
The strengths of the distributed model are that it does not require substantial founding capital, that it allows the field to develop across institutions rather than being identified with any single one, and that it is robust against the loss of any individual node. The weaknesses are that distributed networks tend to lack the visibility and political weight of named institutions, that they depend on the personal commitment of individual scholars in ways that are difficult to sustain across career transitions, and that they often fail to consolidate into more permanent forms.
For neglect studies, the distributed network model is probably the right description of the field’s first five to ten years, even if the longer-term aim is for centers and dedicated programs. The early phase of any new field involves a small number of scholars working at multiple institutions without formal connections, and the question is whether the eventual transition to institutional consolidation happens deliberately or by happenstance.
2.4 The Embedded Subfield Model
The fourth model is for neglect studies to develop primarily as a subfield within an existing discipline rather than as a separate field. The most natural host disciplines are metascience and science and technology studies, both of which have institutional infrastructure that could absorb neglect-studies work without major modification.
The case for the embedded model is that it requires the least founding effort and that it places the field within established research communities with mature methods, funding pathways, and training programs. The case against it is that the embedding tends to assimilate the embedded work to the host discipline’s center of gravity, and the features that make neglect studies distinctive — its methodological pluralism, its applied policy engagement, its concern with humanities and qualitative questions as much as with scientific ones — are precisely the features that the host disciplines are least equipped to preserve.
The recommendation is that the embedded model should be one element of a multi-pronged strategy rather than the primary model. Encouraging neglect-studies work within metascience programs and science and technology studies departments is valuable, particularly in the field’s early years, but it should not substitute for the development of independent institutional homes.
2.5 Recommendation
The field should pursue a layered strategy. In the first five years, the distributed network model is the realistic description of the field, and effort should focus on building the connections among scholars at different institutions, on supporting embedded work within metascience and science and technology studies, and on identifying the two or three institutions best positioned to host founding centers. In the second five years, two or three dedicated centers should be established. In the decade following, a residential fellowship program affiliated with one of the centers can serve some of the functions of a school of advanced study without the institutional weight that the full model requires.
3. The Flagship Journal
A field consolidates around its journals more reliably than around any other single institution. The journals define what counts as the field’s work, how that work is evaluated, what methods are recognized, and what subjects are within scope. A field without a flagship journal must depend on outlets whose editorial commitments lie elsewhere, which produces persistent friction in the publication process and inconsistency in what reaches the field’s scholarly record.
The proposal is for the field to establish a flagship peer-reviewed journal with the following characteristics.
3.1 Scope
The journal’s scope should be the systematic study of scholarly neglect, broadly construed to include all seven categories of the Paper 1 taxonomy and all the methodological approaches of Paper 2. The scope should be defined inclusively in disciplinary terms — humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and applied fields should all be within scope — and restrictively in topical terms, in the sense that the journal should publish work on neglect rather than work in whatever substantive areas the journal’s authors find neglected.
The distinction matters. A scholar who has identified an instance of neglect in their substantive field has a choice between publishing in the flagship neglect-studies journal (where the contribution is methodological and field-building) and in their substantive field’s journals (where the contribution is to the substantive literature). The flagship journal should clearly be the former. Articles in the flagship should be primarily about the patterns, mechanisms, and consequences of neglect, with substantive findings serving as cases that illustrate methodological or theoretical contributions to the field of neglect studies itself.
3.2 Editorial Governance
The editorial structure should be designed for cross-disciplinary integrity from the outset. The editor-in-chief role should rotate among scholars from different parent disciplines, with terms of three to five years and explicit succession planning. The associate editor pool should be deliberately balanced across disciplines and methodological approaches. The editorial board should be constituted with similar attention to balance and should include both senior figures and early-career scholars whose careers are being built within the field.
The governance structure should also include explicit provision for the tiered evidence standard proposed in Paper 2. The journal should publish work at all three tiers — exploratory, substantiated, and rigorous — but should label submissions accordingly and should structure peer review so that reviewers assess submissions against the standards appropriate to the tier the author claims. This structure allows the journal to serve as a venue for early-stage work without compromising the field’s professional standards, and it gives the field a vocabulary for discussing the evidentiary status of its own publications.
3.3 Peer Review
Peer review in a methodologically pluralist field requires deliberate attention to who is qualified to evaluate what. A bibliometric analysis of neglect in a particular literature should be reviewed by scholars who can assess both the bibliometric methods and the substantive claim about the literature; a historical recovery of an abandoned research program should be reviewed by historians of the relevant period and by substantive specialists; a counterfactual estimation of the value of investment in a neglected area should be reviewed by decision analysts and by relevant domain experts. The journal’s editorial office must maintain a reviewer pool with this kind of methodological and substantive breadth, and editors must be trained to construct review panels that match submissions appropriately.
The journal should also experiment with adaptations of peer review that have been developed elsewhere in metascience and adjacent fields. Registered reports, in which the methods of a planned study are reviewed before the study is conducted, are particularly well-suited to neglect-studies work because they reduce the risk of motivated identification (in the Paper 2 sense). Open peer review, in which reviewer reports and identities are made available alongside published articles, has both advantages and costs and should be considered as an option rather than a default. The journal’s editorial policies should be explicit about which adaptations are being used and why.
3.4 Access and Indexing
The journal should be open-access from the outset. The field’s commitments to redistributing scholarly attention sit poorly with a publication model that restricts access to the field’s own work, and the practical disadvantages of paywalled publication for a new field — limited readership, slower citation accumulation, restricted policy uptake — are substantial. The funding model for open-access publication is a non-trivial question, with options including author processing charges, institutional subsidies, consortial funding, and platinum open-access models supported by foundations. The choice among these is one of the most consequential the founding editorial committee will make, and the choice should be made with explicit attention to its effects on who can publish in the journal and who can read it.
Indexing in the major scholarly databases is essential for the journal’s long-term standing and should be pursued from the outset. The standards for indexing have become more stringent in recent years, and a journal that begins with attention to these standards is more likely to achieve indexed status than one that has to retrofit them later.
4. Companion Publication Outlets
The flagship journal cannot meet all the publication needs of the field, and three companion outlets are proposed.
4.1 A Registry of Neglected Questions
The first is a structured, citable registry of neglected questions, organized by discipline and category, with metadata on the evidence supporting the claim of neglect, the methodological approach used to identify it, and pointers to relevant literature. The registry would not be a journal in the conventional sense; it would be a database with persistent identifiers for each entry, allowing entries to be cited in subsequent scholarship and updated as new information becomes available.
The registry serves three functions. It provides a publication venue for findings that are too specific to support a full journal article but that are nonetheless worth contributing to the field’s cumulative knowledge. It creates a coordination mechanism for scholars who want to work on neglected questions but do not know what is already in progress or has been identified by others. And it produces a public-facing record of the field’s identifications that funding agencies, learned societies, and other research-governing bodies can consult.
The registry’s governance must address the obvious quality-control problem: any open submission system will receive contributions that do not meet the field’s standards, and a registry that becomes a repository for unsubstantiated claims will damage the field’s credibility. The proposed structure is that registry entries are submitted with the documentation appropriate to one of the three evidence tiers, that entries are reviewed by a small editorial committee before being accepted, and that the registry interface displays the tier prominently alongside each entry. The standard should be substantially lighter than full journal peer review but substantial enough to filter out impressionistic claims.
4.2 A Journal of Negative Findings and Abandoned Programs
The second companion outlet is a journal specifically for two kinds of work that the flagship will not naturally publish: cases of apparent neglect that on investigation turn out not to be neglected, and historical recoveries of abandoned research programs that on investigation turn out to have been appropriately abandoned. Both kinds of work are important for the field’s intellectual hygiene, and both are unlikely to find publication elsewhere because they produce findings that read as failures.
The journal would address the motivated-identification problem (Paper 2, section 9) by giving negative findings a venue, and the recovery-enthusiasm problem (Paper 2, section 4) by giving careful conclusions against revival a venue. The professional incentive structure that the field needs — in which careful work that produces unpopular conclusions is rewarded — depends on such an outlet existing.
The journal would also serve a methodological function by making explicit the standards by which apparent neglect is distinguished from genuine neglect and by which abandonment is evaluated. The case studies it publishes would become the field’s primary teaching material for these methodological questions.
4.3 A Stocktaking Review Series
The third companion outlet is a review series, organized around periodic stocktakings of how attention is distributed within particular disciplines and subdisciplines. The review series would be modeled on the Annual Review series in various fields, with commissioned articles by senior scholars examining the structure of attention in their areas and identifying the patterns of neglect that emerge.
The review series serves a different function from the flagship and from the registry. Where the flagship publishes work on neglect studies as a field and the registry catalogs specific instances, the stocktaking series produces field-wide assessments that can be used by funding agencies, learned societies, and university administrators as primary sources for understanding the structure of attention in particular areas. The stocktaking articles would also serve as authoritative entry points for scholars new to a particular area, and over time the accumulated series would constitute a comprehensive map of attention across the disciplinary landscape.
The series should be commissioned rather than open-submission, with the editorial committee selecting authors from established scholars whose breadth and standing make them credible producers of field-wide assessments. The commissioning process is more labor-intensive than open submission, but the quality control it provides is essential for the series to serve its function.
5. Conferences and Meetings
The conference structure of a field shapes its professional community as powerfully as its journals do. The proposal is for a two-tier meeting structure.
5.1 The Annual Congress
The field should hold an annual congress that serves as its primary meeting and as the venue at which the field’s professional community recognizes itself as a community. The congress should be modeled on the annual meetings of established interdisciplinary fields rather than on the meetings of single disciplines. The program should include plenary sessions, parallel paper sessions organized around the methodological domains of Paper 2 and the categories of Paper 1, poster sessions for early-career and exploratory work, workshops on methods, and dedicated sessions for engagement with research-governing institutions (funding agencies, learned societies, government science offices).
The congress location should rotate across regions and continents on an explicit schedule, both to support the participation of scholars from regions less well represented in the dominant scholarly networks and to prevent the field from becoming identified with any single national research system. The rotation schedule should be set by the field’s eventual professional association and should be honored even when particular years’ rotations are inconvenient for the largest national contingent of scholars.
5.2 Specialized Workshops
In addition to the annual congress, the field should support a network of specialized workshops on particular methodological domains, particular disciplines or sub-disciplines, or particular substantive cases. These workshops should be smaller (twenty to fifty participants), held more frequently (several per year across the field), and oriented toward intensive engagement with a particular question rather than toward the broad community-building of the congress.
The workshop network should be sponsored by the field’s centers and by its eventual professional association, with funding made available through small grants that workshop organizers can apply for. The structure should be deliberately decentralized, with workshop topics determined by the proposing organizers rather than centrally planned, so that the field’s specialized work can develop in directions that the central institutions have not anticipated.
6. Curricula and Training
The training of scholars is the slowest of the institutional commitments to take effect, since doctoral programs operate on multi-year cycles and the scholars they produce enter the field years after the training decisions are made. The slowness is a reason to think about curricula early rather than late.
6.1 Doctoral Training
Doctoral training in neglect studies should combine three elements. The first is methodological breadth across the domains of Paper 2: a graduate of a neglect-studies doctoral program should be competent in bibliometric methods, in expert elicitation, in historical and archival research, in comparative analysis, in counterfactual reasoning at least at the level of intelligent consumption, and in qualitative interviewing. No scholar will produce primary work in all six domains, but every scholar should be able to read and assess work in all of them, since the field’s triangulation standard requires the integration of findings from multiple methodological domains.
The second element is substantive grounding in at least one host discipline. A neglect-studies scholar who has not received serious training in the substance of a discipline will be unable to assess claims about neglect in that discipline with the depth required for rigorous work. The doctoral curriculum should accordingly include a substantial substantive component — typically equivalent to a master’s degree in the host discipline — alongside the methodological training in neglect studies proper. The combination is demanding, and doctoral programs in the field will likely require longer time-to-completion than single-discipline programs.
The third element is a thesis project that combines empirical neglect-mapping with a substantive contribution to a previously neglected area. The dissertation requirement reflects the field’s two-sided character: a neglect-studies scholar is both someone who studies the patterns of attention and someone who contributes to redirecting attention through their own work. A dissertation that identifies a neglected area without contributing to it produces a critic rather than a scholar; a dissertation that contributes to a neglected area without locating the contribution within a methodologically careful account of why it is neglected produces a substantive specialist rather than a neglect-studies scholar. The field needs both, but the doctoral program should produce the integrated form.
6.2 Master’s-Level Training
Master’s-level training is a different matter. The proposal is for one-year master’s programs aimed at three constituencies: scholars trained in conventional disciplines who want to incorporate neglect-studies methods into their work without retraining as full neglect-studies scholars; practitioners in funding agencies, learned societies, and policy bodies who need methodological literacy in the field’s outputs; and journalists, science communicators, and policy analysts who engage with research-priority questions in their professional work.
The master’s curriculum should be more methodological and less substantive than the doctoral curriculum, on the assumption that students bring their substantive expertise from prior training. The curriculum should be structured around the methodological domains of Paper 2, with case-based teaching drawing on the field’s accumulated literature. A capstone project demonstrating competence in at least one method, applied to a question of the student’s choice, should be the assessment requirement.
6.3 Continuing Professional Education
A third training stream addresses scholars whose careers are already established but who want to incorporate neglect-studies methods into their work. The format should be intensive short courses — typically one to two weeks — held in conjunction with the annual congress or at the field’s centers. Topics should include bibliometric methods for non-specialists, expert elicitation, the design of priority-setting partnerships, and the methods of historical recovery.
The continuing-education stream serves the field’s longer-term consolidation by extending its methodological reach into adjacent disciplines without requiring those disciplines’ scholars to undertake full retraining. It also generates a network of scholars in other fields who are familiar with neglect-studies methods and can serve as informed reviewers, collaborators, and translators of the field’s work to broader audiences.
6.4 Undergraduate Exposure
The case for undergraduate exposure to neglect studies is weaker than for the other training streams but worth making. A dedicated undergraduate major in the field is probably not warranted at any institution in the near term, both because the field is too small to sustain a major and because the methodological breadth required for serious work is difficult to achieve at the undergraduate level. A single undergraduate course on the structure of scholarly inquiry, drawing on neglect-studies methods and findings, is more tractable and could be taught at any institution with a single qualified faculty member.
The function of such a course is less to produce neglect-studies scholars than to introduce a wider undergraduate audience to questions about how scholarly attention is allocated. The course belongs naturally within general-education or honors curricula and would serve students entering any of the fields that the eventual neglect-studies workforce will draw from.
7. Sequencing and Founding Institutions
The institutional infrastructure outlined above is substantial, and the question of sequencing is consequential. The proposal is that the elements should be developed in roughly the following order, with the understanding that some development can happen in parallel.
The first priority is the founding of two or three centers at institutions where senior scholars are positioned to host them. The centers should be selected for their location in institutional environments hospitable to interdisciplinary work, for the presence of senior scholars committed to the field, and for the availability of internal funding that does not depend exclusively on external grants. Candidate institutions include several research universities with established metascience programs, several with science and technology studies departments, and several with policy schools that have demonstrated interest in research-policy questions. The selection process should be deliberate rather than first-come, and the founding centers should be chosen with attention to their complementarity rather than their similarity.
The second priority is the flagship journal, which can be launched once the founding centers exist to host its editorial office and to provide the scholarly base for its initial submissions. The journal should be launched with explicit commitments to the tiered evidence standard, to cross-disciplinary editorial governance, and to open-access publication. The funding model for the journal should be settled before launch.
The third priority is the annual congress, which can begin as soon as the founding centers and the journal are in place. The first congress will be small, and the program will need to draw heavily on invited contributions, but the establishment of the meeting as an annual event matters more than the size of any particular year’s program.
The fourth priority is the registry of neglected questions and the journal of negative findings, both of which can be developed in parallel with the flagship once the editorial infrastructure exists.
The fifth priority is doctoral training, which should begin with cohorts of one or two students per year at each of the founding centers, with the training delivered through existing departmental structures supplemented by neglect-studies-specific coursework. Dedicated doctoral programs in neglect studies can be considered once the field has produced enough graduates to sustain them and once the demand for such graduates from funding agencies, universities, and policy bodies has been demonstrated.
The stocktaking review series, master’s programs, continuing education, and undergraduate exposure all belong in the second decade rather than the first, on the assumption that the field’s first decade is occupied with consolidating the elements above.
8. Conclusion
The academic infrastructure proposed in this paper is ambitious but not unprecedented. Comparable infrastructure has been built for other emerging fields — bioethics, science and technology studies, metascience itself — within periods of one to two decades, and the lessons from those cases are partially transferable. The differences for neglect studies are that the field is more methodologically pluralist than most of its predecessors, that its applied dimension creates institutional complications that more purely scholarly fields do not face, and that its commitment to redistributing scholarly attention requires it to embody that commitment in its own institutional design.
The infrastructure cannot be built without funding, and the funding question is the most difficult one the field faces. Paper 4 takes it up.
Notes
[^1]: The literature on the institutional development of interdisciplinary fields is substantial; the National Academies (2005) report remains a useful overview, and the case studies in Frodeman, Klein, and Pacheco (2017) provide more recent treatments across multiple fields.
[^2]: The literature on the development of metascience as a field offers a particularly relevant comparison case; see Ioannidis et al. (2015) for an early statement of the field’s institutional ambitions and Hardwicke et al. (2020) for an assessment of progress.
[^3]: The literature on academic journal founding and editorial policy is largely practical rather than scholarly, but the work of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) provides foundational standards for new journals, and the broader literature on open-access publishing is reviewed in Suber (2012).
[^4]: The Annual Review model, developed by Annual Reviews Inc., has served as a template for stocktaking review series across many fields; its history and editorial structure are documented in the publisher’s institutional materials.
[^5]: The literature on doctoral education in interdisciplinary fields is reviewed in Holley (2009) and in subsequent work on the structure and outcomes of cross-disciplinary doctoral training.
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