A Different Perspective on How Well Journals Track Quality

I'd like to comment on these two interesting posts over at NewAPPS. It's generally assumed that the "top journals" in the field tend to publish the best philosophy. Yet several questions have been raised.

In the first post at NewAPPS, it is reported that Jason Stanley had some of his work rejected at a numbe of top journals, only to see it turn into a book that is now one of the most cited works in the very journals that rejected his papers. This suggests -- although some have disputed it -- that some of the very top journals in our field systematically rejected top-flight philosophical work.  Although different explanations are offered, one explanation -- which I have discussed before, and which I am not alone in thinking -- is that "top journals" these days are overly conservative, tending to publish "boring" papers.

This same hypothesis is floated in the second post at NewAPPS, where Jon Coqburn notes that some of (what he considers to be) his very best work has never been able to find a home in a good journal. Cogburn's feeling is that the explanation for this may be the following: the more non-trivial (and potentially important) a paper is, the more likely it is to be rejected, not because it should be rejected but simply because reviewers will have more objections to non-trivial work (objections may not in fact be reasons to reject, but rather good reasons to accept, as it means the work may be interesting and worthy of discussion).

Anyway, Cogburn wonders whether others have had his experience. Well, I have. One of my papers has been bouncing around at journals for years. Like Cogburn, my experience is this: I think it's some of my best work, I've had a number of people at conferences and elsewhere tell me it is important and "will" be published...and yet I can't find a home for it. Why? Time after time, I seem to get one reviewer who advocates "accept without revision" and another who advocates rejecting it because he/she has objection after objection. Alas, most of the time I feel these objections are reasons the paper should be accepted, because they are issues people might want to discuss in print! (A lot of times also, I just think the objections are bad).  In addition, I've faced the following dilemma. In the past, I actually dealt with all the objections in the paper, but the paper balooned to 60 pages long, and I had reviewers/editors rejecting it for being too long!

With all this in mind, I would like to float another reason to think that top journals might not track quality. For top journals to track quality, two things must be true:

1. They must tend to receive the highest quality work, and also
2. Reliably select it when they receive it.

Most of the discussion on NewAPPS has been on issue (2). I want to raise a question about issue (1).  

I read the book "A Beautiful Mind" this past summer, and couldn't help but be struck by a passage in which John Nash was given publishing advice by his advisor.  Nash had just come up the Nash Equilibrium, and his advisor reportedly told him to publish it immediately in the worst journal he could find.  Why?  The short answer: to avoid getting "scooped."

Let me explain why this struck me. I have gotten scooped on at least two or three occasions. On each occasion, I had a paper bouncing around for a while and someone else published roughly the same argument/idea in a top journal. Accordingly, my feeling these days is this: now that information is so widely available on the web, and more and more stuff is being published more and more quickly, it is increasingly vital to get good ideas out in print fast. So, for instance, I have a couple of papers right now that I think are super good (there, I said it!;). However, although I think they are good, I'm very wary of (repeatedly) sending them to "top places", for a couple of reasons. First, I'm in a year-to-year position, and just don't have the luxury of sitting around for years waiting for these papers to work their way through the review processes at Mind, Journal of Philosophy, and Phil Review.  Second, given my experiences getting "scooped", I'm sometimes wary of even trying (I have two papers right now, for instance, that I would be absolutely devastated should someone publish something similar before I do. This makes me want to get the stuff out immediately, even if it means a lower-ranked venue).  Third, I tend to think that because reviewers at some of these jounals seem to be so conservative (Cogburn's point), it's sometimes just not a good bet to make, especially given how long review processes can take (sending one article to several different journals can eat up years!). (Side-note: I actually still do send some of my stuff to top journals. I more or less "split it down the middle", sending maybe 50% of my stuff to top places and the other 50% to lower-ranked places, which seems rational to me, all things considered).

Now look: I certainly don't mean to pretend that because I have incentives to avoid sending things to top journals, it follows that top journals don't tend to receive "the very best work."  All I mean to suggest is that there plainly are such incentives: strong incentives for people with great philosophical ideas to send their work elsewhere, to "lesser" venues that are more likely to publish it.  

Indeed, I've even heard of some "top people" say stuff like this. For instance, I seem to recall coming across a blog post somewhere where someone -- I think it was Colin McGinn (!) -- said something like, "I don't even send stuff to journals anymore. They just reject my stuff."  And this was coming from a top name in the field.

Anyway, this is one of the main reasons I am dubious about the claim that top journals tend to publish the best work. On the one hand, the idea that they do actually doesn't sit well with my experience as a reader (most of my favorite articles in recent years seem to have come out in "lesser" places). More deeply, though, it doesn't sit well with my experience as a submitter.  There seem to me to just be too many reasons to think that there are people out there with great work who don't submit that work to the top journals.

Am I right? I wonder how many people have this experience: the experience of believing, firmly, that some of your work is awesome, but of sending it to lower-ranked places due to various professional incentives. Are there many of you out there?

(PS: apologies for the rambling quality of this post. I've been absolutely buried with work the past several days -- both teaching and research -- but I wanted to get this post out!

Comments

[Rachel]

...I don't think you want to take professional cues from McGinn. That strikes me more as laziness rather than something one ought to emulate. Maybe they're rejecting his stuff because it's crap (and there's some good reason to take this view, based on some of his recent work). ...and that's putting aside his horrible other qualities.

[Marcus Arvan]

I certainly wasn't suggesting emulating McGinn in any regard. All I meant to do is give an example I came across of a person who was very successful publishing who reported similar disincentives to submit to such journals.