How do articles get written in ways that lead them to keep getting cited decades later—even when they are bad or mediocre articles that do not merit re-reading? The question may seem trivial, but answering it requires us to rethink research practice and methods: Instead of particular projects and studies, or the work of individual researchers (how one conducts interviews, writes, etc.), methodology becomes a problem of assembling textlines, hooking up with viable ones, connecting some, cutting others, enfolding or highlighting particular threads, redirecting others across disciplines, and eventually putting texts in the stream, sending them downline into an afterlife in other researchers’ textwork. The present article, based on archival research, uses a detailed case study of the production and subsequent transformation and citation of an article on “teachers’ beliefs” to develop these ideas and consider the methodological implications of attending to textlines and textual afterlives.
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