In our ongoing efforts to improve this journal, I recently asked the editorial board’s advice about several issues. One was to decide what, if anything, we should do with papers that appear to be excessively parochial. These are studies that suffer from what an international journal might view as myopia. No matter how scientifically solid they may be, such papers appear only to be written for colleagues in their own parish. A closely related problem is papers that completely ignore literature on the topic from outside their own country. No sensible investigator can possibly believe that it is only their fellow countryfolk who are doing good work in their field. Such thinking simply adds scientific parochialism to literary parochialism.

Some apparently myopic papers may exist because it is actually the case that the findings only apply to a specific locale. As a rule, these are relegated to brief reports. But more often, it may be that many only seem to be parochial because of how they are written—too little effort is made to capture …