What's a Scholarly Essay?

romana klee, #345 atoms, flickr, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I am pushing to meet a big deadline March 1, so I'm afraid my blog is getting little attention this week.

But my looming deadline is for an edited collection, and it got me pondering a question I've been wondering about for many years:

(Okay, this is probably just of interest to my academic readers, but here goes)

What do we call all those scholarly pieces of writing we do that appear in different forums? I write scholarly articles (published in scholarly journals), and my university's official credentials repository says that scholarly articles have to be separated from book chapters. But my book chapters appear in scholarly edited collections, and they look a lot like my scholarly articles published in scholarly journals. To me, my scholarly articles and scholarly chapters are the same kind of writing. 

But do we have a name to collect them all?

One of the reasons I'm thinking about this now is that I'm working on an edited collection, and the previously published pieces in it are referred to as "essays."

Now, I'm in English, and one of my colleagues used to be an expert on "the essay," and you can be sure this guy was not thinking about non-literary writing. "The Essay" used to be said with rarefied tones and a turned-up nose. But scholarly "pieces" often get called scholarly "essays." Not in the Montaigne sense of essay or any of those 18th-century essayists like Addison and Steele that I used to study and love or the contemporary literary essayists who do nature writing or travel essays.

Am I missing something? Why don't we have a name for all those scholarly pieces, whether published in a journal or a book, that represent the short-form (not book) version of our scholarly research?

I must be missing something. Or there's something weird about our academic culture that we have this genre we've written a long time and we don't have a common name for it? Or my university is weird in insisting that scholarly articles are not the same as scholarly chapters? (I did used to call them all scholarly articles, and I didn't know I was lumping together different things.)

Okay, so comment, please, with your five-paragraph theme or scholarly article or quick comment on what you call that thing, or why it doesn't have a name, or what's so obvious I'm a dolt for not knowing it.

My deadline hits this week, so I hope to be back at full strength next week.