One of the skills philosophers-to-be must master is how to negotiate the ins and outs of getting their papers published in journals. Of course, the main thing is learning how to write good papers in the first place, but as we all know, writing a good paper is not a sufficient condition for achieving publication. As the years go by and I move steadily from ‘young, up-and-coming philosopher’ to someone with responsibilities for training other people, I’ve found it increasingly important to guide them in the process of finding the right home for their papers. Obviously, learning to do so is a never-ending process, and we ‘old people’ are still prone to making strategic mistakes; but there is a thing or two that we learn through experience regarding how to select the right journal(s) to submit a paper to. In this post, I’ll elaborate on some of the ‘strategies’ I’ve been passing on to the people I supervise; many of them will sound obvious to more experienced members of the profession, but I hope they can be useful to those still learning to navigate the seas of the publishing process.
One well-known heuristic is to follow the order of a certain ‘hierarchy’ of journals, from top to bottom. So you start aiming as high as you can, and then go one step down the ladder if your paper is rejected. Now, while this is generally speaking a sensible approach, there is much to be said against it. For starters, it may take a very long time until the paper is finally accepted somewhere, and if you are a young professional in the job market, this is definitely something to be avoided. Moreover, some of the so-called top journals are known for taking much too long before getting back to authors, and this is a luxury that many cannot afford.
So now the three parameters that I consider most important when selecting a journal to submit a paper to are:
- Average review time
- Whether comments by referees are sent to authors, and if yes, the quality thereof
- Thematic ‘match’ between the journal and the paper
The rationale for the first parameter is obvious. As for the second parameter, it is possibly the most important one of the three, especially for junior people. This is because insightful, fair feedback on a paper is something quite hard to come by, and thankfully there are still many members of the profession who seem to take their duties as (anonymous) referees very seriously, thus providing extremely useful comments. In my experience as an author, a rejection with good comments by referees can be a very productive experience; at least some of my papers were considerably improved with the help of comments in reports recommending rejection, and were eventually published elsewhere. (So this is why, as a journal editor, I do my utter best to find good referees for the papers I handle – not an easy task!)
As for the final point, thematic ‘match’, it may also seem obvious at first sigh, but my impression is that it is all too often under-appreciated. In philosophy*, we somehow came to believe that institutions such as departments and journals can be ranked in a strict, linear order, and this is what seems to be behind the hierarchy heuristic I mentioned above. But obviously, different journals have different interests and thematic-methodological emphases, so obviously, a certain paper will be a better match for certain journals than for others. (It may still be useful to draft a rough hierarchy among the journals that would be a good match for a given paper.)
You may be asking yourself: but where do I find information on all these parameters? Lucky for us all, Andrew Cullison has created an incredibly useful resource for the profession, namely a quantitative overview of reviewing processes for different journals. The data is collected by means of short surveys people can fill in after submission experiences, and thus the overview gives a rough but good impression of what one can expect when submitting a paper to a particular journal. The parameters it lists are: average review time, average time for publication, acceptance rates (both initial and overall, and for R&R), frequency of submissions receiving comments, and quality of comments.
(I must confess never having filled a survey with my submission experiences, but this is such a fantastic resource that I urge you all to participate! I promise to do it next time…)
Naturally, Cullison’s overview does not provide information on the last parameter, thematic match. For that, perhaps the most reliable approach is to talk to more senior philosophers, who have a ‘feel’ for what sort of thing gets published where. But there is also the simple heuristic of googling the key terms of your paper, and seeing where papers on similar topics tend to be published.
Ultimately, while we like to think that the process of peer-review is ensuring that (all and only) the very best work in the discipline is being published, the truth is that there is a considerable element of luck in getting a paper accepted for publication. (Here is a post where I discuss whether peer-review really is tracking quality in philosophy.) The suggestions above are meant to help you tinker with luck a bit more in your favor; indeed, a certain amount of strategic thinking can make all the difference.
* UPDATE: just this week Kai von Fintel was saying on Twitter that there is no such ranking for departments in linguistics.
New APPS 
Leave a reply to Catarina Dutilh Novaes Cancel reply