In my opinion, the scholarly literature of librarianship has an IMRaD problem. IMRaD is an acronym that stands for “Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.” Along with some variants, it is the standard paper structure for much of the sciences and social sciences. Wikipedia includes a visualization of IMRaD that looks like this:

To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with IMRaD papers. They are a specific — and effective — form of scholarly communication. But what rankles me is when people insist (as a peer reviewer did to me recently) that this is the only format for communicating paper-length ideas in librarianship, as though this was a matter of fact, not of (very human, imperfect) negotiation.

There are plenty of other methodologies that can inform librarianship, and some of these have nothing to do with IMRaD papers. Some library journals allow case studies. But beyond that, the humanities are a (rather massive) area of study that basically ignores the IMRaD format altogether. Are we going to exclude all of that methodological knowledge from librarianship? And if so, why?

Some “explanatory pluralism”, to use the felicitous phrase of Robert McCauley[1], would only improve our field. There’s room for many approaches to librarianship. This is part of the reason why we’re starting a new journal. There is an opportunity here to publish useful work in librarianship that isn’t IMRaD.

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[1] McCauley, R. (2013). Explanatory Pluralism and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Why scholars in religious studies should stop worrying about reductionism. In W. W. McCorkle & D. Xygalatas (Eds.), Mental culture: classical social theory and the cognitive science of religion (pp. 11–32). Acumen.

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