I can’t remember the last time I saw the cover of an academic journal.

I know that’s a strange, trivial, and possibly meaningless observation, but it’s a strange thing to realize because I read journal articles regularly. I have access to more academic journals now than I probably ever have. But I almost never encounter them as journals. Usually I’m already looking for something: I type a handful of terms into JSTOR or a library database, scan the results, open an article, download the PDF. Somewhere along the way I see the journal title, volume, and issue, but mostly as citation information.

But what do I do if I don’t already know what I’m looking for until I find it?

Lately, I’ve been trying to get back into Poe scholarship. I looked up the journals, I looked up articles, and I sorted chronologically. I now have a list of a ton of perfectly good articles, but JSTOR didn’t actually answer my more general question of what’s going on in Poe scholarship right now. Sure, go to conferences, you’ll say—I’m broke. Maybe I’m just missing something established scholars already have: familiarity with what “the good journals” are through decades of experience.

Sure, I can look up rankings. Google Scholar Metrics only provides one entry for “Poe”—The Edgar Allan Poe Review. But surely the way to compare “the good” scholarship on Poe isn’t just to look at journals with “Poe” in the title. SCImago lists two entries under “Poe Studies.” And when using OOIR, the Literature and Languages filter doesn’t produce much about literature, mostly linguistics and communication. Now do I have to rank the ranking websites to even begin?

I know how to search scholarship. I know how to read scholarship and follow citations. I’m realizing that I don’t know how to browse it. I wish I could browse scholarship in the same way I browse a bookshelf. I wish it were easier to encounter scholarship in its publication context. I have plenty of access for reading articles, but I want to read journals.

What do I even mean by read journals? I’m not pining for the “old days” of glossy covers, nor am I trying to argue that “the past was better.” JSTOR—or insert your database of choice—is perfectly happy to give me an issue of Poe Studies, but there is clear encouragement to encounter scholarship via the article, while I experience the journal mostly as metadata.

I know PMLA is prestigious. I’ve read plenty of articles published in PMLA. And I can sort by “new” and find the newest articles about Poe in PMLA, but that still doesn’t answer my question about what Poe scholars are talking about right now among themselves. How do I find out which of these new ones are even worth my time? Simply being “the newest” doesn’t actually mean that much.

Of course a niche journal on Poe would tell me what scholars are talking about, but the more niche it gets, the less it appears in metric data—so how am I supposed to know it exists? Do I just have to get lucky with my search terms? Sure, I can pick up Poetics, but if my current institution doesn’t subscribe to it, how do I afford a $96-a-year journal on an adjunct salary? I guess that means sticking to individual articles rather than browsing the journals.

Browsing journals, rather than simply reading through a list of disconnected articles, would help me build the “map” I’m looking for, while a search engine can’t retrieve the thing I don’t know exists yet.

I’m new to academia. I’m still young. I never even got to live through the days of print journals. So am I just nostalgic for a time that didn’t really exist at all? Maybe. Is the solution simply to get some years under my belt? If there isn’t a technological solution for orienting oneself to a field, then how do I do that in an age when the technological solution to access doesn’t necessarily provide it?

Maybe orientation was always messy. Maybe the solution is ultimately just experience, but what am I supposed to do in the meantime?

I’m not saying I want a social media-style algorithmic “trending page” or anything like that (or what the hell, maybe I am?), but I’m realizing that access does not necessarily equal orientation to a field.

Or I guess I simply mean I don’t want something driven by click count. But maybe there’s something to a trending page? Why can’t I browse “This Week in Poe Scholarship” and see where that leads me? Why can’t I listen in on the conversations going on right now without already having the years of experience necessary to know what those conversations are?

So, initially I complained that one of the tools I tried didn’t even let me narrow its literature category appropriately.

It does. I hadn’t noticed the subfilter.

Then I discovered it has a page literally called “Trending.”

At this point, the possibility that the problem was me was becoming difficult to ignore.

Now that I know some of the infrastructure does exist, how does a new scholar learn the infrastructure? I’ve already discovered, while writing this, that one of the tools I was complaining about does more of what I wanted than I realized. That’s encouraging. There are apparently things out there I don’t know how to find yet.

Maybe I don’t actually need to see journal covers again. But I’d like to get better at seeing the journals behind the articles. For now, maybe I just need to stop searching long enough to look around.

Maybe that’s what this blog is going to be. I don’t really know. Maybe I’ll document some of the process of learning the infrastructure of scholarship and figuring out how to orient myself within a field. Maybe six months from now I’ll have a completely different answer to all of this.

There are apparently things out there I don’t know how to find yet.

Which, come to think of it, was the problem in the first place.