Do publication venues matter for many jobs?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I have heard that the venue of one's publications doesn't matter for many jobs. Is this true? I guess I have in mind TT (or otherwise permanent) positions that aren't R1 but which still have a research expectation. I am curious about this for both hiring and promotion reasons. Does publishing in, say, generalist journals outside of the top 20 or so look bad to a hiring committee? Could the venue of one's publications every be an issue for tenure or some other form of promotion? Is it better for junior members of the profession to publish anywhere rather than nowhere? Thoughts on any or all of these questions, especially from current faculty involved in these decisions, would be helpful.

Good questions - it would be great to hear from search committee members!

If you've hired before (or are hiring now), what kind of department/institution are you at, and how much (if at all) do publication venues matter to you (or committees you've served on) in hiring?

Comments

[Tenured now]

My first job was at an R2 university with no graduate program in philosophy and a 2/3 teaching load. I served on several hiring committees, and venues for publications absolutely mattered to my more-senior fellow committee members - plus, when I was going up for tenure I was told that the only slam-dunk tenure case would be at least 5 publications in top-5 specialist journals or top-10 generalist journals, and at least 5 publications in top-5 specialist journals or top-20 generalist journals.

I don't at all mean to claim that this is representative of jobs outside of the R1 PhD-granting departments, but I want to throw it out there because it's a very real data point.

[The Real SLAC Prof]

I work at a liberal arts college with some research expectations, and I guess I would say that the prestige of publication venues matter at least somewhat at the hiring and promotion stage.

When hiring, most of the people on the market in a given year seem to apply for our positions. That means candidates are in competition with the top candidates on the market. In such an environment, part of distinguishing between two candidates with, say, two publications each involves taking into account the prestige of the publication venues. We certainly aren't digging out the latest survey from Leiter or making fine-grained distinctions between the prestige of various journals, but it is true that a publication in a top journal will be more impressive than a publication in a journal which does not have a stellar reputation.

Two caveat: first, after a threshold of one or two publications, the more top publications the candidate has, the more the committee may begin to worry about whether the candidate is better suited to a position at an R1. Second, strength of research program is just one aspect of what we are taking into account in making hiring decisions.

So too, when making promotion decisions, the prestige of publication venue matters, but it isn't the only thing that matters: it is usually easier for external letter writers or Chairs to write strong letters for a person who has high status publications (you can cite the status of the venues in your letter!), as opposed to someone who has low status publications, but it is certainly possible to write a strong letter in either case. Moreover, the department will be assessing the candidate in terms of their teaching and service as well as their research.

The OP does not state their reason for asking the question, but if they are thinking about strategy, I think it is a far better strategy for people to aim to publish one or two pieces at top journals, rather than multiple pieces at less prestigious journals. If you have no luck placing a piece at a top journal, it may make sense to set your sights lower (especially if you already have a job), but I don't think quickly settling for low status venues early in your career because you'd be happy landing a TT job at a non-R1 institution is prudent. At least for my college, the tightness of the job market means that you will be competing with the top candidates, i.e., those who have high-prestige publications, so you can't avoid the issue of prestige.

[Bill V.]

Speaking from my experiences hiring at an R2 where the department is more interested in research than the university is, my answer is "it depends."

These days, to be competitive even for a TT position at mostly-teaching institutions like mine, candidates need to have some publications, where "some" = one or two. It isn't a requirement mentioned in our ads, but given the rankings we end up with after evaluating the pool, candidates getting interviews strongly tend to fall in this group. Additional publications after, say, three, add almost no additional value. (In fact, having a lot of publications as a very junior person can make it look like the candidate might be only interested in research and not a good fit for our place, or a flight risk.)

Where something is published is of less direct interest to us. What is usually more important is whether the paper is solid philosophically, and whether it is in one of the AOS or AOC areas we are searching for. If it came to a decision between two candidates who were equal in teaching, AOS/AOC coverage, and number of publications, I really doubt that place of publication would be a deciding factor. But the comparisons between candidates are rarely so direct, and place of publication can be part of the gestalt of a file. Place of publication can also stand as a proxy for quality when none of us are expert enough in its subfield to judge the paper on its own merits.

There are some journals that just don't look good to search committees, so try to avoid those. (If no one has ever heard of it, if it is an obscure journal published in a distant country, or if it seems to be one of those predatory journals that accepts just about anything.) Even then, if you have one of those and one or two other good publications, that would be fine. Maybe the way to say it is that a publication in a "suspect" venue would not be disqualifying, but it might also not do you enough good to make your file competitive.

Our tenure standards are not especially high, so as long at least some of the 3-5 (?) publications in the tenure file are in solid journals, that would likely be more than enough. So far everyone we have hired on the standard mentioned above looks to be doing more than enough to easily earn tenure.

[JohnSims]

I would echo the first post above. I work at an R2 and the official load is 3-3. Where you publish definitely matters and people in my department have publications with top 10 journals and books with Oxford Press, Blackwell, Chicago etc. People publish in other places as well, but journal quality is a general concern for us. Also I agree with the other poster that quality matters more than quantity. 1-3 articles is a good number, and once you get beyond that it's not an additional factor since I don't need you to be a speed demon with publications so much as know that you're work is going to be read in your field.

[G]

I work in an undergraduate-only program at an R2 with a 3:3 load. For us, the venues of publication do not matter according to our tenure standard. We only require peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, books, etc. As long as your publication is peer-reviewed, your publication would count. Since the document does not require “blind” reviews, book chapters reviewed by editors would count too. Sometimes, external letters talked about the quality of journals, both positively and negatively. But since the quality of journals is not part of the official document, we would not hold against people just because of those external letters.

[Daniel Weltman]

I'm at a fancy SLAC. There are probably as many answers to this question as there are search committee members, but overall I would say publication venue matters in three main ways:

1) Because of our location we get a lot of applications from people publishing in predatory journals or in the next best thing, journals that publish basically whatever they receive. We typically want people who hold themselves to high standards when it comes to research, teaching, etc. and publishing in those journals tends to indicate you might not be doing this (or that you may not even have much of a sense of there being a distinction between higher and lower standards in these contexts). So, publications in very bad places is often harmful to one's application. Readers of this blog are likely not to even be aware of most of the existence of these bad places, let alone tempted to publish in them, so I mention it largely to remind you that if your biggest worry is "I published in a generalist journal that's not as much loved by people who read the Leiter Reports as some other generalist journals" then you're already in a world-class elite of philosophy practitioners and so you can calm down a little bit.

2) We want to hire people who will get tenure and tenure depends in part on external letters. External letter writers may or may not care about publication venue and they may or may not care about it in all sorts of ways. Safer then to hire people who are likely to do quite well with respect to the most exacting standards one might have, since it's a buyer's market after all, and even an unknown university in a relatively unappealing location (like us) can afford to be picky in who we hire.

3) Although I don't really care, and it's possible none of my colleagues in fact care (so I might be semi-slandering someone here), I think in principle and possibly in practice one or more of us might care about publication venue not in terms of what it signals about a person's expectations for themselves, and not in terms of what it indicates about how likely they are to get tenure, but in terms of what it indicates about how good their work is. For those people, fancier venues are better, everything else held equal.

In all of these cases, the example question OP gives (publishing in generalist journals outside the top 20) does not look bad. It doesn't look as good as publishing in fancier generalist journals, so you might get beat out by someone with 14 papers in Mind with the way the job market is looking lately. But you won't get a black mark for publishing in something other than a journal with a 0.006% acceptance rate, and a publication in a decent (but not top 20) generalist journal is I think pretty much always better than nothing.

[YMMV]

Not to be 'that philosopher' who says 'it depends', but I can't emphasize enough that, when it comes to promotion, you should do everything you can to learn about the practices within your department and university. I hope this doesn't need to be said, but you should never take general advice that runs contrary to what your university policy dictates in terms of promotion. If your department cares a lot about the top 10 journals, then (assuming you want to be promoted by your university), that's what you should aim to do. If it doesn't, then you can follow suit.

[something to think about]

Publication venues absolutely matter. I worked at a state university which did not have a graduate program and we could and DID care a lot about where people published. In fact, once you take the time to read the writing samples of candidates (their publications) you can see the difference yourself. Generally, papers in the more reputable journals are of better quality. With that said, it was sometimes off putting to read VERY technical papers as writing samples for a job at our college. Such a candidate would have little opportunity to teach such technical stuff, and such a paper does not give the readers the impression that the candidate will be able to reach our students and teach the range of courses they will have to teach.

[onthemarket]

"something to think about"'s comment bums me out a bit. As someone whose work has been becoming increasingly technical (sometimes to my own dismay), I don't think the fact that I write about or work on really hard stuff reflects on my ability to teach. When I write, I tend to just follow where the ideas/arguments lead me, and lately they've been leading me to more and more technical areas. But I am also still super stoked to talk in a classroom about, I don't know, J.S. Mill's utilitarianism, and I think I am pretty good at explaining tough concepts and ideas to students. I understand where this bias comes from to a certain extent, but in some ways I think the opposite can be true: try explaining to your interested grandmother what you do when you've been working on weird Sellarsian-inspired logic and its potential scientific application lately and you will quickly develop strategies for communicating ideas in accessible ways even if publishing those ideas requires a high level of technicality. I suspect that teaching experience, especially of lower-level classes, would tell you a lot more about the teaching abilities of a candidate than whether their writing is technical.