Why "Just publish a paper in Philosophical Review" is not all-round good job market advice for grad students

This tweet was meant satirically, but taken in earnest by many people: 

(I don't know how to do alt text here so I'll just also type out what it says: "Grad Students: You NEED to publish. But you NEED to do so in top journals. I routinely see grad CVs with 4-5 publications, but in small journals. And I think… Great, but they must have a small mind. One publication at a top journal is far better than five in low-impact venues.")

The tweet struck a nerve because it seems to be advice many grad students hear, or at least, gather from successes of others. It does seem that one paper in Philosophical Review is vastly better than a ream of papers in journals you never heard of, and even better than papers in respectable, but lower-ranked journals including specialist journals.

Here are my thoughts on the matter: there is no unified publication strategy that will work for all job candidates. You need a publication strategy tailored to your work, your level of risk aversion, and even your geographical location. Taking advice like this (meant non-satirically) can lead to a suboptimal job market strategy.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with publishing in Philosophical Review or a similarly prestigious journal as a graduate student. But advice along the lines of "just publish in Phil Review" is akin to advice young fiction writers get to "Just write a NYT bestseller" or job market candidates in all academic markets to "Just land a TT job at an R1". 

You do not control publication, only submission. 

For better or for worse, submitting can only be done at one journal at a time. Do not violate this rule even if a journal does not explicitly state a policy against it, as it is seen as extremely bad form (I have seen a couple of times as an editor this happen and it reflects very poorly on the candidate indeed).

So, your paper is gone for several months, each time you submit. Acceptance rates of more prestigious journals are lower, because the number of submissions is much higher. This is not a strict one-to-one correlation but a good guideline. Each time you send out a paper you are putting it out for months at a time and the more prestigious a journal, the lower (on average) your chance of acceptance. Here below is a figure from Jonathan Weisberg that gives estimated review times. 

In my editorial experience (I am not sure if there are official figures to back me up), graduate students, tenure track professors, and philosophers off the tenure track in postdocs or VAPs are much more frequent submitters of papers compared to tenured professors. This makes sense--they need more publication. Also, tenured professors have other venues available to them such as edited volumes and monographs. If you write a monograph, you have less time to also write papers for journals in addition to this.

I saw in the early stage of the pandemic a huge number of papers come in written by grad students, often of poor quality (no adequate grasp of literature etc). Again I am not sure if that is representative, but perhaps this was due to the collapse of the job market and grad students trying in a short span of time to improve their CVs. Though many of these papers were sent off to referees (in spite of some doubts, but if I am not triple-anonymous reviewing I tend to give grad students the benefit of the doubt), they were unsurprisingly rejected, often in firm terms. Submission, though it looks like a lottery, isn't a lottery. If you send something polished that you have gotten feedback on from others, there's a much higher chance it makes it through the review process. This underscores again the importance of sending only well-written and completed papers for review--if you think that you cannot reasonably improve anymore, that's the time to send it out. 

When I referee for journals, I do take into account (somewhat) the prestige of the journal in that the paper needs to clear a higher bar for originality and maturity of thought for a more well-known and more prestigious journal (this also includes specialist journals) compared to less-known journals. I know not everyone does this, but at least some people do. As a referee, I do not know the identity of the author, so I can only go by the work itself. Some people say they can guess, but I can't. I am often surprised seeing a paper in print that I refereed--in many instances I thought "X might have written this?" but then it turns out the paper is written by a lesser-known grad student or other early career author. 

Writing papers for publication is a craft that requires a high level of expertise, and this requires a long learning process. Much like a professional fiction writer's first novel (some exceptions notwithstanding) is not their best work, an academic will likely improve their craft over time. If you are not early career, what would you say your best work is up to now? I hazard to guess it's not your first paper based on a dissertation chapter. 

In that respect, it can be hugely demotivating to send one's papers into the refereeing void to the most selective journals, only then to get harsh comments (or even no comments at all, in the frustrating "slow desk reject" I see at some journals). One needs significant mental resilience to send that paper out again. I've seen so many grad students use what I call to myself a "cascade" strategy, sending to the top journals one at a time, hoping it sticks, to then eventually give up or have no publication by the time they go on the market. The cascade strategy is hugely risky and demoralizing. It may pay off, but given the tiny odds, it very well might not. 

I think it is important for the student to gauge whether the journal is a plausible fit for their work. Many philosophical specializations are underrepresented in "general" journals, whereas others (notably epistemology, metaethics) are overrepresented. It's possible, for instance, to get your paper in a less commonly taught philosophical tradition published in Philosophical Review. But it's difficult, seeing how few papers in LCT traditions are published there. So you go up against enormously tiny odds. Look where the work you are doing gets published, look at where the papers you are reading are published, and submit there. 

Another issue to keep in mind is that not all hiring schools are interested in candidates with top journal publications. I know anecdotally people who have a huge list of publications in top generalist journals but no tenure track academic employment, in part because the rest of their profile (e.g., their grad school) is more in line with teaching-focused smaller schools. I have written earlier about how top research intensive schools hire mainly from each other, whereas candidates of lower-prestige graduating institutions rarely get jobs at such schools. However, they frequently get jobs at teaching focused colleges, including small liberal arts colleges and state schools that serve a large local student population. 

One needs to keep these realities in mind when submitting papers for publication. It may be better for someone who focuses on jobs with high teaching loads (and there are many more of those than research-focused jobs) to attempt to publish one's work in a few lower-prestige but still decent journals rather than setting one's sights on top generalist journals. 

Finally, there are differences across countries in the importance placed on journals. For instance, when I lived in Belgium and worked there, impact factor was a huge factor. It helped secure funding for universities. Now, many philosophical journals which are seen as lower-prestige have higher impact factors because they are cited more often by authors in the sciences. A Chinese grad student told me (I have no first-hand information) that the same is true in mainland China. A paper in Synthesis could, in this metric, have more impact than a paper in Philosophical Review. It is important to know the local culture of the country you are applying in (or countries, if you want to go more globally on the market) and strategize accordingly. 

Comments

[Overseas Tenured]

I'll just put here my 2 cents, and I realize it's probably not what many of you will want to hear. What I say applies exclusively to research jobs, but by no means only to the fancy ones (I'm in a non-fancy overseas research job).

The publication arms race ramped up like crazy. At this point I regularly see ABDs and fresh PhDs hitting the market with 5 or 10 (!) publications, all of them in top-10 journals, with a few in top-5. I got applications like this for a postdoc with pretty rudimentary conditions. And I regularly see applicants like this landing at jobs in expat departments in developing countries and in European postdocs in places that you never heard of.

I'll try to describe things from my own point of view. As a SC member, do I expect applicants to our overseas postdoc position to have a publication in Mind, one in PPR, and four more in Phil Studies-level journals fresh out of PhD? No, I absolutely don't *expect* this. However, when I open the files, as a matter of fact many people do have that profile. And of course, while this doesn't automatically settle the outcome of a search, it obviously has a strong effect. Moreover, while 10 years ago I would have assumed that these people would have much better options than the meager postdoc we can offer, today I tend to assume the opposite. When we pick a candidate, we can be 95% sure that s/he will have no other option and will be very happy to choose employment, any employment anywhere, over unemployment.

So this might sound brutal, but I'm afraid it's misleading (and misleadingly comforting) to focus on what's "reasonable" to expect from candidates. The competition is so insane that people with CVs who might have had a shot at top-20 PhD programs 10 years ago and perhaps tenure in the same places 20 years ago are now in cutthroat competition for poorly paid 1-year postdocs at the geographical periphery of analytic philosophy. This is great for us but obviously very bad for them. I can sincerely emphathize. I know what my CV looked like when I finished, which wasn't even that long ago. It was a pretty good CV at the time, but today I probably wouldn't get anything with it.

I realize this might sound extremely discouraging, but I feel that I need to be frank. The competition is insane, and no amount of positive spin will change that. Extrapolating from my own experience I suspect that any globally advertised research position anywhere in the world, be it tenure-track, continuing or postdoc, receives several applications from candidates barely out of grad school with many publications in tip-top places, and if offered the position, most of those candidates won't have any other option and will take it in a heartbeat. It's sad that things came to this and that so many talented philosophers will end up unemployed, but this is the reality I see.

[anonymous faculty]

Just wanted to respond to Overseas Tenured, because what they say does not match my experience (in terms of choosing people to interview) at an R1, PhD granting (very not fancy though) department. In our hiring, of course a lot depends on who is on the committee, but I would estimate that less than 20% of my colleagues are significantly swayed by considerations of CVs like the one Overseas Tenured described. For example, in the last search we had that I was a part of, two candidates who looked like that had to be vehemently argued onto the interview list to join candidates who almost all (if they were coming out of grad school) had at most 2 publications, often in specialty journals or top 15ish journals rather than top 5. In my department, I think the explanation for why we don't strongly value the kind of CV described above is: most of us read writing samples, and read a lot of writing samples and research statements, before making decisions. (We weed candidates out who don't fit the AOS, and some of my colleagues probably don't read writing samples of people with no publications, but I know some of us do.) We don't think we have some better judgment about quality of philosophy than top journals, or something obnoxious like that; but we want to read something that we think is interesting, maybe doing something new or unusual, that makes us want to talk to the candidate and learn more about them and their research program. Further, while we don't have a strong cohesive identity as a department, I think there are some things we agree very generally about about approaches to doing philosophy, what is valuable, etc., and that often does not match what top 5 generalist journals judge to be valuable.

Sometime our judgements match up with the fancy CVs that Overseas Tenured describes. But just as often--probably more often!--they don't. And sometimes one or two people on the committee will be swayed by the fancy CVs, but at the end of the day if others on the committee can point out that the content of those papers is actually not quite what we want, those considerations will be outweighed.

Finally, I'll just mention: most departments (at least among those that aren't concerned with the Leiter arms race) care a lot about hiring a good, conscientious, friendly colleague who cares a lot about teaching and service. My department does, and again, we are a PhD granting department! And while it is definitely unfair to read off someone's fancy CV that they are not such a person, I do think there is a weak correlation between "excessive productiveness" and "being a crappy/self-absorbed/non-community-oriented colleague". We're hiring someone for life. Above all it is most important that that person is not a self-absorbed jerk. (Again, I am NOT saying that there is a strong correlation here--but just that it is more often the candidates with the really fancy CVs we end up bringing to campus or first round interviewing who turn out to be broadly agreed to be non-viable because of their lack of interest in our undergraduate and graduate students and in serving our department and university and being a conscientious member of our community.)

[SLAC TT]

Though I am not at an R1, I have gotten a similar impression as Overseas Tenured (though not because these people are applying to my department much).

My question is: have top-5 and top-10 journals been publishing more, or are older members of the profession publishing less than they used to in these venues? After all, if the journals aren't publishing more, then it's a zero-sum game.

[Overseas Tenured]

Thank you for your input, anonymous faculty. I'm obviously not privy to your hiring process, and it's very helpful that you shared a different (and still research-school-based) perspective. I want to make two quick comments.

First: for postdocs, collegiality matters much less. Not being a jerk is still important, but the rest (department meetings, admin work etc.) are irrelevant.

Second: I respectfully beg to differ even on the weak correlation you draw between being very productive and being a good colleague. I realize that this is really, really not the received wisdom of many search committees, but my experience is actually the exact opposite: I think that academic qualities tend to accumulate rather than balance out each other. People who write more papers also (statistically speaking) write more interesting papers. People who are very productive are usually very organized and tend to be also on top of administrative things. People who write well for publication also tend to teach well. And so on. I emphasize: these are weak correlations, but in my experience they are positive rather than negative correlations.

But, I realize that in the end of the day we are just clashing our anecdotal evidences against each other, which is bound to be inconclusive. In any case, thank you for chiming in.

[anonymous faculty]

@Overseas Tenured I should have been clearer that I wasn't disagreeing with you, exactly (in that I wasn't denying your experience!), but just trying to demonstrate that there are lots of different things that people value in hiring, for lots of different kinds of jobs, in order to help support Helen's points (which I really agree with), but also to reassure people that while certain kinds of research-focused jobs care a lot about publication venue and quantity, others value other things (or different publication venues). We can agree to disagree about the correlation claims :)

[Helen De Cruz]

SLAC TT it would be interesting to look at this over time. It is my anecdotal impression (as an editor when looking at non-triple anonymized stuff) that tenured people submit less, which makes sense. They need it less, they have other venues to publish in. Journal publication is, as you say, zero-sum.

In my personal trajectory, I used to have always three papers under review (at least!) at any given time. Now, for the moment I have no papers under review. I'm writing a monograph (under contract), I have a paper in the works, as well as a volume I am co-editing (under contract), so there is just less time and less incentive to send papers to journals. However, if I worked in the UK or in Australia, my strategy would have to be different because of the REF (and its Australian equivalent). So, I also have the freedom of US academia which recognizes a broader set of achievements/accomplishments than the narrow metrics that REF and similar exercises bring.

Overseas tenured is right that the arms race in research positions in Europe and other parts of the world is getting overheated. It's amazing to see e.g., for the British Academy postdoc, a very early career position how super-qualified people with papers in top journals do not get a position, and I've seen similar things in The Netherlands for the VENI scheme. But in the US, there are (thankfully) still so many small teaching colleges, and my impression as a placement director who is now in my third year and see people land jobs (even in this terrible market) is that those colleges just don't care about one's papers in Phil Review or Mind. If anything, it counts against one, as it seems to say something about one's commitment to teaching. I hasten to add that there are lots of people who are excellent teachers and publish in top journals, it's about perception. I think this goes into the point of geography I mentioned at the end--your CV might be a great fit for a teaching-focused SLAC in the US but a post-92 university in the UK would not give your CV a second look because of the REF and general research culture there.

[Assistant Professor]

I also heard versions of this (satirical) advice told to me sincerely while in grad school and I didn't follow it - publishing instead in specialist journals relevant to my AOS. This worked for me. I found it better to demonstrate that I could play the publication game (I understood its norms, I could successfully shepherd a paper through from submission to R&R and eventual publication) and that I could build on this foundation in my career.

During a job search that occurred in my department while in grad school I asked about why one person was being flown out for an interview who had no publication record when the grad students in the department were told we absolutely had to publish to be competitive on the market. A faculty member told me they had it on "good authority" that this candidate had a paper forthcoming in a big deal journal. The paper wasn't even accepted yet! (Of note, the paper never was accepted in said "big deal journal" and the candidate did not get the job, but it was telling to see how at least some members of the department were swayed by this idea of potential in a top journal above all else - but how it can also backfire....)

[TT]

Echoing Assistant Professor as well as Marcus's thoughts above, whether this is good (albeit satirical) advice completely depends on AOS. I am on the tenure track, and I have several colleagues who are on the tenure track in R1 or R2 departments, and none of us have ever published in a "top" generalist journal. But we have published in top journals for our area, and we've developed recognizable expertise in that area. I think it is much better advice to encourage graduate students to find a lane that *works for them* rather than assuming that to be successful every philosopher must publish in a generalist journal.

[ABD]

I have to admit that I find the focus on top journals a bit odd. I work in phil of cogsci and phil of mind and I almost never read anything from a top generalist journal unless it is 30+ years old. Every once in a while I will get curious and flip through some of the latest issues in the top generalist journals and I just don't see anything that is relevant to my work or that really sounds all that interesting (though this could just be the limits of my ability to judge what is interesting or exciting in fields outside of my own). I definitely understand that prestige plays a role in hiring processes, but as a researcher they largely seem irrelevant to my work. The only reasons I've tried to get published in them are for the satirical ones stated in the tweet above. If I was only focused on being part of the conversations that drive my research, its unlikely that I would ever think much about generalist journals, never mind try to get published in them. So, I hope Assistant Professor and TT are right.

(Not trying to diss anyone's work. I'm sure there are tons of interesting publications in them that my haphazard research methods have just failed to come across.)

[postdoc10]

Brandeis just sent out a (kindly worded) rejection saying they had 600 applicants for their position. Maybe there just really isn’t any actionable advice to give grad students at this point. I appreciate Overseas Tenured’s clarity on just how bad things really are.

[getting old]

ABD
My impression is similar. For what it is worth, I am a somewhat established scholar. I do not really read the four generalist journals regularly, and there are few papers in philosophy of science published in them. I have had a fine career - though with many of the typical challenges (like getting a first TT job). I have in fact published in one of those journals. That paper has been cited over 30 times in the last 9 or so years - I have three other papers published after that date in "lesser" journals that have been cited even more frequently.

[SLAC TT]

Helen,

Regarding senior members publishing in top journals, my question was slightly different from the one you seemed to be answering (sorry if I misunderstood). I agree that it makes sense that senior people submit less. As you point out, they need it less (one caveat below). But they also needed it less 10, 20, and 30 years ago, so the fact that they need it less than junior people isn't something new, and so doesn't clearly pertain to whether or not they're filling the journals at the same rate that they used to.

My question is whether the share of articles published in top journals that are written by senior people is going down. On the one hand, assuming journals aren't publishing more, I can't help but think that it must be going down. After all, if there's an arms race at the bottom and it's a zero-sum game, someone has to be losing their spots in the top journals. But on the other hand, there's also an arms race at the top, though less accelerated. The arms race is driven in part by thing like the REF, etc. In addition, when I pick up an issue of Mind or Phil Review or Nous, I see a lot of established names.

[Kate Norlock]

Let's all pause to enjoy my umbrage at "They must have a small mind." Wow, that's the most belittling thing I've read today (but it's midmorning so just give me time). What a guy.
I've served in the USA and Canada on TT searches at two very good undergrad-only programs many times and the number of times a top-five journal article was a decisive factor was zero. I read the top-five journals close to never. So I figure the NEED is the need to hedge one's bets to get the rare top job in the field, when those come around. For those who are crushed by the arms race, though, it is at least a little good news that for many posts it's not a need at all.

[Helen De Cruz]

SLAC TT: I rarely read top-4 (or top-5) journal articles, since I don't really need it for the research I'm doing now or most of the research I've done in the past so my impression is entirely anecdotal. Here's my anecdotal take (not to be taken for data because we don't have it): people who regularly publish in Nous, Phil Review etc and who are established in the profession tend to work in countries/environments where publication in these journals is a must: the UK, Australia, many European countries, Israel etc.

I think the arms race has amped up so that cost-benefit wise it does not really pay to do this unless you have to. If you have e.g., a book contract or edited volumes to write in, or good specialist journals, why jump through these hoops? Now, there are lots of academics working in the Uk and other countries with REF-like structures, so perhaps because of this the overall proportion has *not* gone down, but if we break it down geographically, we'd see some interesting differences between e.g., the US and the UK. Or at least, that's my hypothesis!

[SLAC TT]

Thanks, Helen! I wish the philpapers team would get on this haha. At the very least, I might tally the authors over the past year in the big 4.

[Chris]

Elitism in academia? How shocking.