Musings on Disciplinary Morphology and Nomenclature in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Implications for Book Selection

Scholarly publication reflects disciplinary orientation, so much so that publishers and library collections personnel use disciplinary nomenclature as referent. University press publications, as well as other serious academic publication venues, may reflect disciplinary nomenclature, if not alignment with those disciplines featured in the AAUP Directory. Using the Directory's discipline and publisher grid for 2007, the article discusses disciplinary nomenclature with the idea of proposing a model or perspective that illuminates the nuances and organic nature of knowledge not easily captured by disciplinary nomenclature. Commonly accepted currency in the academic enterprise, disciplinary nomenclature may be best seen as an organically foundational approach to knowledge discovery and generation and, ultimately, as situated within scholarly communication venues. As knowledge is organic in nature, it may best be seen through the morphology of disciplinary formation and ecology, permitting nuances to emerge as organic formations and intellectual contours. This useful and flexible definitional approach to disciplinarities – subdisciplinarity as well as multi-disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and trans-disciplinarity – permits scholars, publishers, and librarians a perspective subtle enough to consider an intellectual cartography that includes the organic nature of scholarship as well as the publication of that knowledge. Such fields as American studies, Middle Eastern studies, and urban studies offer additional perspective when confronted with disciplinary nomenclature. Without disparaging the received wisdom and attribution commonly ascribed to disciplinary nomenclature as used by researchers, publishers, and librarians, the scholarly communication system requires additional perspective, especially where nomenclature is concerned.