This may be the paper Luthien Rising was referring to. It’s a review essay by Michael Drout and Hilary Wynne which considers the state of Tolkien scholarship:

Michael Drout and Hilary Wynne, "Review Essay: Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a look back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982(including a bibliography of recent works)" (See link below.)

To give you a taste, here’s the first paragraph:

Tolkien criticism has been afflicted with two seemingly incompatible faults: while critics have endlessly covered and recovered the same ground, they appear not to have read much of each other’s work.  And while it seems that the failure to read and acknowledge other critical works would at least prevent arguments from falling into familiar ruts, Tolkien scholarship has had no such luck (with the important exceptions we discuss below).  We hesitate to put words in people’s mouths, but it seems as if far too many critics of Tolkien think: “the people who have previously worked in this field must have been either freaks or fools, so I don’t need to pay attention to them.”

Drout and Wynne discuss how so much material has appeared in Tolkien newsletters and in journals like Mythlore and Mallorn – and some very good pieces are buried in there. There’s a problem with these journals for aspiring Tolkien scholars, though. In order to build a promotion or tenure file, a professor has to publish in peer-reviewed journals.   Mythlore, for example, is a peer-reviewed journal, but I feel fairly certain that if an English professor published only in that, his or her colleagues would be suspicious of the publication’s quality because of the journal’s association with fans. The fact that fans can be more informed about the texts than some “professionals” is a revelation that hasn’t hit many in the academic world. 

Tolkien scholarship has soared in visibility in just the last couple of years, though. Conference announcements, proposals for essay collections, and books published by university presses are coming out all the time.  The new peer-reviewed Tolkien Studies journal, published by a university press, will also be seen as a creditable publication, I think.  I just met a few months ago a PhD student who had no problem at all in convincing his English department that he could write a dissertation on Tolkien, with comprehensive exams in the medieval and modern periods.  A modernist colleague of mine was shocked to hear that the journal Modern Fiction Studies was devoting an entire issue to Tolkien essays this year.  I’m sorry if all this sounds like tedious professional gossip; what I’m trying to say is that Tolkien scholarship now seems to be moving into the academic mainstream.  What this will do to the interplay between “amateur” and “professional” remains to be seen.

I think that our Reading Room works just the way a real-life reading room is supposed to work:  a place where people can gather to discuss books that they are passionate about and to share their insights and inspire each other.  I’ve never come across such a place in my “real” academic  life – maybe in some wonderful university I’ve never heard of it really does happen?   Professional academic discussion lists do exist, but none that I have ever participated in has been of the collective nature that Luthien Rising describes.  Some of the ideas I’ve seen here are as good as anything I’ve read in Tolkien scholarship, but to be published in an academic journal someone (or a group) would have to write the ideas up in the standard  way, or if someone was using ideas from here, they would have to be cited and acknowledged in the standard ways (but we’ve had a thread on this topic not too long ago). 

How to know if things posted in the Reading Room are new and original?  The only way I know is to read all the criticism you can get your hands on.  Do a bibliographical search to see if you can find any publications under the relevant topics. (The MLA bibliography is the one for literary subjects).

And now excuse me while I go read the free issue of Tolkien Studies, courtesy of Wynnie's link in her post.  I wonder if the articles will appeal to more than just professional literary critics?