Working papers and conference presentations

Many scholarly articles (including most of these) start out as working papers, seminar talks, conference presentations or discussion drafts, and only appear as academic publications later, after revising and rewriting. The internet makes it much easier to find scholarly articles, old and new, but this also sometimes leads to confusion, because there is no consistent and reliable procedure by which old preliminary working papers and presentations disappear once a published version is finalized.

Here, a distinction is drawn between:

Active working papers, which have not (yet) been replaced by a published article, and

Superceded working papers, which are those that have since been published, usually with revisions.

Other writers quoting from or referencing these articles should use the final published version (if there is one). Where there is only an active working paper, not yet superceded by a publication, the author should be contacted first.

Many of the articles and working papers listed on this site are related to the research conducted for the book, The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the United States, 1900-1914, or to the PhD dissertation which preceded the book. Interested readers should also consult the published book rather than the earlier PhD dissertation.