With the Journal of Near-Death Studies we showed what a journal of its own means for a research field. The German-speaking world has its counterpart – not only for near-death research but for the entire field of the scientific study of anomalies: the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik (Journal of Anomalistics), published since 2001, peer-reviewed, and with a format one would wish upon many an established discipline: here, dispute is not a mishap but the programme.
Why it is needed
What happens to research topics that the academic enterprise has sorted out as "unscientific" we described in the portrait of Michael Schetsche: they rarely founder on the data, often on the sorting machine. Such topics – from parapsychology and exceptional experiences to contested margins such as UFO research – need a place where studies can be reviewed, criticised and documented without the topic itself leading to rejection. Exactly this place was created in 2001 by the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik e.V. (GfA) with its journal; since volume 21 (2021) it has been published jointly with the IGPP, with the psychologist Gerhard Mayer of the IGPP heading the editorial office since 2017.
The Truzzi legacy: dispute as a format
What makes the journal special is its blueprint. Its declared model is the Zetetic Scholar, published from 1978 to 1987 by the American sociologist Marcello Truzzi. Our readers know Truzzi from the article on pseudoskepticism: he co-founded the great skeptics' organisation CSICOP, left it when examination turned into dismissal, and coined the term pseudoskepticism for that behaviour. His counter-design was a journal in which proponents and critics have their say in the same issue. The Zeitschrift für Anomalistik has institutionalised this principle as open peer commentary: a main article is followed by invited critical commentaries from different camps – and the authors' reply. The reader is not served the result of a dispute, but the dispute itself. It is the same pattern we praised in the Journal of Near-Death Studies with the Augustine debate – here it is not the exception but the standard format.
What it contains
In content the journal covers the whole spectrum of anomalistics: empirical research reports, methodological and history-of-science essays, review articles, discussion contributions and an extensive book review section. Thematically it ranges from parapsychology and exceptional experiences – such as the surveys we presented in the Psi Report Germany – through documented haunting cases to topics contested even within frontier research itself. Three issues appear per year, in German with English abstracts (the international title is Journal of Anomalistics).
Openly accessible
As with the Journal of Near-Death Studies, the same holds here: anyone who wants to know what this research actually publishes can simply read it. Older volumes are freely available in full text on the website of the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik, and the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – the international quality register for open-access journals. For a field routinely suspected of secretiveness, that is a remarkable degree of transparency.
Context
With the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik, the infrastructure triad of the German-speaking world that we have portrayed piece by piece in this series is complete: an institute with library, archive and counselling; a learned society organising the field; and a peer-reviewed journal that hardens findings through review and keeps criticism on record. What IANDS and its journal do for near-death research, the GfA, the IGPP and the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik do for German-language anomalistics as a whole. And its Truzzi format is perhaps its most important contribution: it demonstrates what a scientific culture looks like that is neither credulous nor pseudosceptical – but contentious in the best sense.
Sources: Profile and full-text archive of the journal on the website of the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik (founding 2001, publication schedule, open peer commentary, Zetetic Scholar model); the IGPP's ZfA page (joint editorship since volume 21, editorial direction Gerhard Mayer); the entry "Zeitschrift für Anomalistik" in the German Wikipedia (DOAJ listing, format history); supplemented by our portraits of the IGPP, the Journal of Near-Death Studies and the article on pseudoskepticism.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.