I would be very grateful if NewApps readers who are philosophers could fill out the following brief, anonymous survey on journal submissions. The aim is to get a picture of what kinds of journals you submit to, especially to the journals that are regarded as the top general philosophy journals. https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6lM1JE4Q88BruhD
Results will be posted when the data have been processed.
The link in this post doesn’t work – it takes you to a thanks for completing the survey page.
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Helen, you should remove the last part of the link. It leads to a screen that says: “Thank you for taking the survey. Your response has been recorded.”
For those eager to start, this seems to be the correct link: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6lM1JE4Q88BruhD
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Sorry! That was a pre-emptive thanks for taking the survey. The link should work now. Thanks for pointing it out
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Just a heads up… History of philosophy is listed twice in the AOS question.
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Hi Colin: Alas, yes, I realized (several people mentioned it in the open feedback). At this point, I can’t change it or risk invalidating the whole survey. But I will code them together into one variable, so even if you’ve only checked it once, it should come up fine.
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I did the survey. Now what’s my policy? I submit to the either the most specific or least prestigeous journal I can find because I want as many publications as I can get and it doesn’t matter where they go or who reads them. That’s what my university wants. Very early in my career I submitted to PPR, because I didn’t realize how prestigeous it was, and got in. But I haven’t done that since. I submit to good journals in philosophy of religion because that’s specific enough to give me a shot. But I will not submit to prestigeous general interest philosophy journals. Why should I bother? I think we have to be honest with ourselves about our abilities. I got out of grad school hot to do metaphysics, which I love. But I’m not good enough to compete in that area. So I got into feminism, where the standards are lower and it’s easier to publish. I wish I could do metaphysics but it’s not feasible for me. My aspirations are modest–and realistic. Beggars can’t be choosers.
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Our institutions indeed exert a strong influence on publication – if your institution just wants publications, but doesn’t care where, you don’t need to aim for the top. When I worked as a postdoc in Belgium, what mattered was if your paper appeared in a journal indexed in Web of Science with an impact factor. Now, there are very few philosophy journals indexed in WoS (although the list is growing), and most of these are in the Arts&Humanities index, which does not provide impact factors. The reason for that was that the way money is allocated to universities depends to some extent to how well people publish in such journals – a model rather slavishly adopted from the natural and social sciences. Anyway, there are very few philosophy journals with impact factors. Most of these are phil of science or phil of cog science, so Biology & Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology etc have impact factors, whereas general journals do not. It was only gradually that I realized restricting my publications to IF journals was perhaps in the best interest of my department, but not necessarily in my best interest. So I abandoned that strategy.
Next to that, I think risk-averseness is also an important factor. I am going to report the data once I have done the analysis.
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