Increasing journal prestige by increasing rejections?

In our February "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I'm curious about others thoughts on this, especially in light of the ongoing conversations about a scarcity of reviewers.

I recently learned that a journal (that will remain nameless) has adopted an interesting policy in an attempt to become more prestigious: reject a significantly larger percentage of submissions. This strategy is relevant to reviewer scarcity because many (if not most) of these rejections are desk rejections.

Does this seem like an artificial way for a journal to become more prestigious? I'm not sure, maybe it's just brilliant! After all, people value things that are harder to obtain/achieve, and one way to make a journal article seem more valuable (on a CV, for instance), is to make it scarce Maybe prestige itself is somewhat artificial, and this is just an excellent illustration of that.

One reader submitted the following reply:

I worry about this type of tale. How on earth would you come to learn this? Or is it some sort of urban myth floating around. I assume any journal that aimed to do this would want to hide the fact.

I'm not sure about this. Why would a journal want to hide that they are becoming more selective? William Peden submitted the following more nuanced response:

If the desk rejections are arbitrary, it's an artificial but also quite risky strategy. To develop prestige, a journal needs a reputation as both as place where bad submissions tend to be rejected AND where good submissions tend to be accepted. Risking the latter has consequences, e.g. if authors send work they think is great to a journal and it gets desk rejected, then the authors might reason that the journal isn't a good fit for their future research, even if the author thinks that research is excellent. On the other hand, if the desk rejections are not arbitrary, then this can be a good way to justifiably obtain prestige. Again, there is a risk: firstly, if the journal has a problem of too many submissions, this policy can make it worse! That's because authors would rather have a quick desk rejection that waiting months and months for editors to find reviewers. Secondly, if the journal doesn't have an oversubmission problem but lacks prestige, a high rate of desk rejections can make the attractiveness of submitting there even lower. How can all of these incentives interact? I am collaborating with some economists to model exactly that sort of question. One thing we have proven beyond all reasonable doubt: smart editors should always desk accept our papers.

This seems right. Increasing selectivity (and openly signaling this) could increase a journal's perceived prestige, but it's a risky strategy--and so what I expect more often happens is that good journals slowly become more selective as their prominence and submission numbers increase, so as to mitigate these risks. But I'm not a journal editor, so I'm just speculating here. What do you all think? It might be good to hear from journal editors in particular!

Comments

[Also worried]

I think it's impossible to say without knowing what journal you're talking about. Is it a specialist journal? Is it a generalist journal that hardly anyone has ever heard of? Is it a 'top-20' generalist journal by prestige that wants to move into the 'top-10'?

Leaving that aside, I don't see why you wouldn't share the name of the journal. People choose where to submit their work in part on how likely they think it is that their work will be published. If you have some information that can help people maximize their chances of publishing their work quickly, you should share it.

If you have reason to believe the journal doesn't want this out there, it sounds like the editors are up to something mischievous, and people in the field should know about it. If you don't have any reason to believe they don't want this out there, hiding the name of the journal does nothing more than artificially generate insider-knowledge that benefits people with connections and harms people without.

[Marcus Arvan]

@Also worried: I appreciate your points, but I think the OP was right to share their query here without identifying the journal in question.

This blog is a place for discussing issues relevant to early-career philosophers, provided it is done in a manner that conforms to the blog's mission. Identifying particular parties who don't want to be identified isn't, I think, consistent with that mission. But discussing issues in an anonymized fashion is fine, I think, insofar as it can draw potentially important issues out into the open without casting aspersions toward identifiable parties.

If anyone (including a journal) engages in any kind of malfeasance--and it's not at all clear to me that a journal privately making decisions like these is wrong--then there are other ways (and places) to bring those kinds of things to light.

[Overseas Tenured]

Journals often publish stats about their rejection rates, and the correlation between prestige and selectivity is rough at best. E.g. I remember that Phil Q and Canadian JP both have a lower acceptance rate than Nous, PPR and JPhil, yet they are less prestigious - probably because there's a lot of self-selection in the latter journals.

I also don't get how a journal can simply decide to become more selective without deciding to publish fewer issues. Maybe a journal with a large backlog of forthcoming papers can do that, but once the backlog is eliminated, they can't become more selective without lowering their output. Am I missing something?

[Tim]

I'm not sure that the strategy would be efficient. So far as I can tell the relative prestige of journals hasn't changed in 20 years. I don't know why that is. My guess is because philosophers rank the prestige of journals in informal ways, reinforced by word of mouth and the occasional blog ranking. But it doesn't seem to me that philosophers use more quantitative methods of ranking (like: accept/reject rates, impact factor, etc.). So changing a quantitative factor like accept/reject rate may not be an efficient strategy for changing relative prestige.

[Arctic cat]

Hey all
Have you looked at the impact factors of philosophy journals. Even the best is very small. Clearly no one is choosing where to send papers based on impact factors. Note what Tim says - the prestige of journals is quite a fixed thing. Of course there changes, but even an icefield changes if you keep watching it.

[David Coldwell]

This is a form of journal predatory practice that we don't hear much about but which is just as insidious and destructive as the predatory practices we hear a lot about such as in Beall's inventory!