A couple weeks ago, a colleague wrote me asking for a pdf copy of a paper that I had in press.  I told him that I would be happy to send him the file if I ever got it. You see, the paper had been "in press" since 2006.  When I said this, he informed me that he was looking at the actual journal with my paper in it; he just wanted a pdf copy so he could use it in class.  Since I had heard nothing about the publication and he just happened to be looking at the hard copy, I asked if he would be so kind as to send me the publication information so I could update my CV.  The citation is as follows:

Jones, J. H., and B. D. Ferguson. 2006. The Marriage Squeeze in Colombia, 1973-2005: The Role of Excess Male Death. Social Biology. 53 (3-4):140-151.

2006!  How can a paper published in December of 2008 have a 2006 publication date on it?  Turns out, it's complicated. It seems that the journal Social Biology has been undergoing some substantial changes and has a horrible backlog of papers.  Apparently there was a big debate at the board meeting at last year's PAA meeting about how to deal with this.  The decision was to maintain continuity, which meant publishing papers in order even if the publication date was two years off at the time of publication. Oh well.  I can't decide whether this is a good or bad thing.  2006 was actually a pretty thin year for me in terms of publications (I was busily trying to learn some new skills as part of my career award and this has a way of slowing the mill), so there might actually be a silver lining to this cloud of delayed publication.  I would link to the paper, but I still don't have a pdf!

Another publication that finally came out was a chapter in a book that Melissa Brown edited.  This book publishes the papers given in a conference held in January of 2003 here at Stanford.  This actually happened before I arrived at Stanford (though I already had accepted the job offer) while I was still a post-doc at the University of Washington.

Jones, J.H. 2008. Culture for epidemic models and epidemic models for culture. In M. Brown, ed., Explaining Culture Scientifically, Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 117-136.

Wow, books take a long time to get published.  It was weird when I got the proofs for this chapter earlier this year.  I hadn't thought about the material in this chapter, literally, in years.  I'm back thinking about this stuff again, albeit in a slightly different form.  But that's material for another post...