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Advice to philosophy graduate students about publishing

Brian Leiter

A philosophy PhD student writes:

I read with interest your post and the comments on which philosophy journals are and are not responsible about dealing with submissions.

I am still rather early in my Ph.D. program, and the question of submission for publication is a new and daunting thought for me. I wonder if you or some of your readers might be interested in giving some rather basic advice on publication to me and others in situations similar to mine. I really don’t even know where to begin thinking about submitting a paper for publication. How does one know when a paper is good enough to be worth a shot? What journal should it be submitted to? What rules govern submission? I gather from the comments to your thread that it is only permissible to send a paper to a single journal at a time.

Really, I think that I — and likely other people similar to me — could just benefit from some general advice about the publication process. I’m not even sure which questions I need to be asking.

Good questions, that deserve an answer.  I’ve opened comments, and invite the many, many readers qualified to offer guidance on these topics to do so.  I’m a bit under the gun at the moment, but I may weigh in too in due course.

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26 responses to “Advice to philosophy graduate students about publishing”

  1. Tim O'Keefe

    Here are my thoughts:

    (1) Graduate students should definitely be submitting papers to journals before defending their dissertations. The sad reality of the job market is still that the supply of fresh PhDs far outstrips the number of available TT jobs, and having a decent publication or two on your CV really helps you stand out from the huge crowd of ABDs and recent PhDs applying for the same jobs you are. And even if you don't get a paper accepted, submitting something can still be valuable experience because (i) you get experience in how the process works, (ii) you get in the habit of submitting papers to journals, which is a habit you need to acquire, (iii) if you're lucky you might get valuable feedback from the journal's reviewers.

    (2) I'd rely on the judgement of your dissertation advisor, or other faculty members who specialize in the subject of your paper, on whether your paper is good enough to send in to a journal. This can also be a good excuse for asking for comments: "I'm thinking of sending my paper to a journal. What changes do you think I need to make to give it the best shot possible of being accepted?" As to where to send it, it need not be a top journal, but it should be a decent journal. (Again, ask your advisor or other people knowledgable in the field as to what counts as 'decent.' Journals specifically dedicated to graduate student publications don't count, unless the search committee isn't paying attention.)

    (3) Each journal has its own rules for submission; just make sure that you follow them. All journals, AFAIK, require that manuscripts be prepared for 'blind review;' i.e., the reviewer shouldn't be able to tell who the author of the paper is. And make sure that the paper is genuinely a free-standing piece. I've peer-reviewed a paper that had a footnote saying something like "…as I argued for in chapter 3," which kind of hacked me off and prejudiced me against the paper.

    Reply
  2. Eric Rovie

    It might be useful, again for those of us in Ph.D programs without much practical journal experience, to relate some of the basics of how journals work, particularly from those of you who have edited or refereed journals. This would include the submission process, how refereeing is handled, and how to get one's "foot in the door," so to speak.

    Reply
  3. Tim O'Keefe

    Although it varies somewhat from journal to journal, here is the typical process:

    (1) A person mails in a paper, (hopefully) prepared for blind review, along with a very brief cover letter informing the editor that he'd like the paper considered for publication and giving the author's contact information.

    (2) The journal's editor decides whether the paper is a plausible candidate for publciation. If not, he immediately informs the author, "too bad." If it is, he sends the paper to reviewers; two is a typical number, but it varies a lot. (The reviewers are contacted by the editor beforehand and asked, e.g., "Hi, I have a paper here, 'The obligations of Epicurean friendship.' Would you mind reviewing it? If you don't have time, would you please suggest somebody you think would be a suitable reviewer?")

    (3) The reviewers look over the paper, write up their comments, and make their recommendations as to whether to publish or not. This is usually the biggest hold-up. Most editors try to get back to authors within 6 months, but it sometimes takes longer than that.

    (4) The editor looks at the reviewes' comments and decides what to do with the paper. Decisions typically fall into one of the following categories:

    (A) Accepted as is. Revisions might be suggested but are not mandatory.

    (B) Accepted, contingent upon revisions. Revisions must be made, but the expectation is that the revisions are pretty straightforward and that a revised paper will be published.

    (C) Revise and resubmit. The author is asked to change the paper in response to the reviewers' comments, and then it gets looked at again and reconsidered. There is no presumption that the revised paper will be published.

    (D) Rejected. Nice editors will send you the reviewers' comments in this situation, but they don't always do so.

    After a paper is accepted, in goes in the queue for publication. In any journal, it takes at least several months between acceptance and actual publication. In many journals it takes a lot longer, because there is a backlog of accepted papers. Before publication, you'll get page proofs–the article typeset just as it is going to appear–to look over and correct.

    Reply
  4. Tim O'Keefe

    Oh, BTW, since the papers are blind reviewed, you don't have to worry about 'getting your foot in the door.' If the system works the way it's supposed to, the papers are judged on the basis of their own merit, not on the reputation of the author. Reputation comes into play later, as people are invited to contribute papers/entries to books, encyclopedias, special issues of journals dedicated to a particular topic, etc.

    Reply
  5. Paul Miller

    Peter Smith at Cambridge has posted some frank advice that I've found useful

    Here's the link:
    http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/students/published.html

    Reply
  6. Robert Talisse

    I think it's also a good idea for students to spend a good deal of time looking through the leading journals in the field they're trying to publish in. Each journal tends to exhibit certain idiosyncracies concerning topics, length, tone, style, and such [e.g., some journals seem more comfortable with logical notation and graphs than others, some seem to like papers that are heavy with footnotes, etc.]. Getting to know these features of the various journals can help one to better select the one to submit to.

    Reply
  7. B. Pryor

    Most journals post their guidelines online, or they will be included as introductory material in each edition. Some guidelines are very specific (as to editorial preferences, etc.). Do a search on google, look at the main site of the publishing house, or check your library's online journals.

    Publishing in the top academic journals (or those that are not 'top') is important and ought to be a goal. But also consider publishing your work in one of the many graduate journals, most of which subject submissions to blind review. There are graduate journals available for just about every philosophical orientation.

    Writing short pieces for newspapers and magazines does not fit into the category of academic publishing (and never substitutes for it), but it does show your willingness to engage with an audience, to use philosophy to connect with a community that is not limited to professional philosophers. I wouldn't put a Letter to the Editor on a CV, but an article under your name might fit.

    Reply
  8. Brian Leiter

    It is not my impression that publishing in one of the graduate journals has any professional value. Getting a good article in to a good faculty-edited journal can strengthen a candidate's dossier; getting a good article in to a weak journal or a weak article published anywhere can be a liability. Or so it seems to me; perhaps others have different impressions.

    Reply
  9. enzo rossi

    As a graduate student, I'd be very grateful if someone could expand a bit on the issue of opinion pieces. I would have thought that they can't be a liability in any important sense, but are they really an asset? Perhaps it depends on the quality of the outlet. So, would an essay in (say) Dissent, Prospect, The New Republic etc. be of any positive significance in the CV of a rookie philosopher? Of course I'm talking about essays related to one's research interests. Many thanks for your time.

    Reply
  10. Mark Capustin

    I think that publishing in a graduate journal can be of some value if done at the right time. In Canada, where M.A. programs are common, I would think that publishing in a graduate journal as an M.A. student may enhance one's PhD applications. And it certainly wouldn't hurt one's application for a SSHRC doctoral fellowhip. If these kinds of publications look like nothing more than padding on the CV later in one's career, is there any reason not to simply leave them off? As a PhD student just beginning to venture into the job market, I have often wondered what exactly is worth including on my CV (I have not included grad student conference presentations or undergraduate awards to avoid the appearance of CV padding). I would be glad to receive any advice that anyone can offer.

    Reply
  11. Daw-Nay Evans

    If a student from a ranked school publishes in an unprestigious journal and a student from an unranked school publishes in a prestigious one how much difference does this make to a hiring committee? Does it change the hiring committee's perspective of the candidates?

    Reply
  12. B. Pryor

    On the assumption that not all readers of this most excellent blog are from top ranked institutions and/or brimming with confidence, I think that publishing in a graduate journal is at least not a liability, and at most can boost one's confidence, clear the cobwebs, and get a younger graduate student used to the whole idea of publishing his or her work. It also helps to form networks and connections among the younger editors of graduate journals. They won't always be young. Again, though, publishing in graduate journals can never substitute for other kinds of professional activities and publications, and I agree they might be left off the CV when replacements come available. (I also agree that my suggestion is best heeded by the MA student seeking a good PhD program).

    Reply
  13. Brian Weatherson

    I don't think student publication is as important as some have been suggesting. Certainly a long list of bad publications doesn't really help much at all. Publications in top journals, e.g. PPR or Phil Review, help a lot more. My advice to grad students in this position is to focus on making sure your best work is as good as can be. If that leads to publication in a top journal, so much the better.

    Reply
  14. Tim O'Keefe

    To respond to Brian Weatherson's point above: yes, a grad student's top priority should be to make one's best work as good as it should be. You shouldn't focus on getting lots of publications in a way that detracts from this. But I also think it makes sense for grad students to be on the outlook for publication opportunities: for instance, to keep in mind the possibility of turning chapters of one's dissertation into (genuinely) free-standing articles and sending them out along the way.

    Reply
  15. Jamin Asay

    My question for the seasoned vets out there is: what do you do when a paper is rejected? Do you just keep submitting it to other journals? When do you know when to retire it and move on? Do philosophers typically have a collection of papers on their hard drives that just weren't meant to be?

    Reply
  16. David Velleman

    I want to enter a dissent here. (For another dissenting opinion, I encourage readers to look at Tad Brennan's comments on an earlier item in this blog.)

    First, graduate students should be aware that, in making tenure decisions, many institutions discount publications that occurred before the candidate was hired. Publishing chapters of your dissertation before you're hired may therefore have the result of excluding your best work from your tenure case. This is a very significant cost. Most people are tenured largely on the basis of the dissertation chapters that they published in their early years as assistant professors.

    A related consideration is that the work you publish as a graduate student is likely to be less well developed and well polished than it would be if you waited, got feedback on it from colleagues in your first job, and worked on it further. Rushing an idea into print is not always the best way to get a hearing for that idea. To make the most of an idea, you need to embed it in a significant piece of work — which you may not be in a position to do while still in graduate school.

    A further problem is that publication is almost invariably a distraction from the work that you need to do as a graduate student (that is, the work of finishing your dissertation). Every once in a while, a student writes a paper that is clearly publishable as is. More often, however, preparing a paper for submission and then revising it in response to referees' comments take a considerable amount of work, much of which may distract from the business at hand.

    Of course, worrying about your tenure dossier may seem unrealistic when you don't even have a job. And here, I'm afraid, the calculation probably depends on which graduate program you're in. I strongly believe that students in highly-regarded graduate programs do not gain an appreciable boost on the job market from having published. Students from less visible programs, however, may need some extra credential to get the attention of recruitment committees.

    I offer that last bit of advice with a heavy heart, because I think that (for reasons outlined by Tad Brennan in the above-mentioned comment) the profession as a whole will suffer if the advice is followed.

    Reply
  17. Keith DeRose

    Like David, directly above (unless someone posts between now as I write & when I post), I feel the truth requires me to say things that may clog up the system if taken to heart by too many.

    When I was starting out, I was quite lucky with some of my papers, which were accepted quickly in good places. But a couple of other ones, which I considered and still consider about as good, really had to bounce around quite a bit before they found a home. One was rejected by, oh, I'd say, five or six journals before it was accepted by PPR, which I considered & still consider an excellent journal (and significantly better than a few that had turned the paper down). I'm very glad I stuck with it. Many have strange mental blocks that prevent them from doing what it takes to get published. Rejection can be tough to take, & many react irrationally to it. I had to find temptations to over-react.

    Here's what worked for me. Once I had a paper ready to be sent off, the "author part" of me handed it off to the "publishing agent part" of me and went on to the next writing project. The publishing agent within sent it off to the journal that seemed best suited, and also made a tenative plan of where to send it next if rejected. When the first journal's decision came in, if it was a rejection, agent-Keith would look at the comments. Sometimes there were comments that looked like they really should be addressed before the paper was sent back out, since the referee made a very good observation or suggestion, and addressing them really could aid the paper's chances for acceptance. In that case, agent-Keith would very reluctantly give the paper back to author-Keith, encouraging him not to get depressed, but to make the needed changes quickly and then to get back asap to the new paper. But often, agent-Keith would just bounce the rejected paper right back out to the next journal (much to the consternation of Tad on the other thread, if Tad had known of this proceedure). This was good policy where possible, b/c author-Keith was on to the next thing, and really shouldn't be disturbed (you know how moody and insecure those authors can be!), and often referees are bothered by things that are unlikely to bother anyone else (indeed, addressing every little worry may not only slow you down, but may actually make the paper worse).

    I had a philosophical friend just a bit older than me, who told me a story about a philosophical friend of his who sent two papers out at roughly the same time, one to the PHIL REVIEW, and one to JP. When they were rejected, he simply switched journals, sending the one PR rejected to JP, and the one JP rejected to PR. My friend told the story as a factual joke, since he took the proceedure to be perfectly ridiculous, but I didn't get the joke, b/c to my thinking, it was just good sense. If you have good reason to think a paper is that good, you shouldn't be thrown off that horse by a rejection or two. That's treating the process as more rational than it is. Thinking of the process as being like dice (if what you need is a 6, but you can throw til you get one, it's really dumb to stop after one throw b/c it wasn't a 6) is making it out to be less rational than it is, but may be the better of the two extremes as a model in some situations.

    Yes, Tad, I know: Some send off papers that shouldn't be sent off, and it would be really bad if they reacted to the above by bouncing half-baked papers all over the place to multiple journals! (& yes, I say to those who are thinking — and I know you're out there — that maybe I was one of those bouncing half-baked papers around where they didn't belong, yes, I recognize that possibility.) But there are those who would do very well to be more persistent.

    How to put this all together?

    Reply
  18. Keith DeRose

    I had to find temptations to over-react.

    That should be fight temptations

    Reply
  19. Jason Stanley

    David Velleman's comments sum up my attitude towards publishing in graduate school. If you're at a leading graduate institution, you shouldn't try to publish, unless you've already gone on the market one year with no success. If you're not at a prestige department, you will probably have to publish.

    This is one among many reasons that it is a fallacy to count one mediocre publication against someone's candidacy for a job. Say a hiring committee for a more senior position will find itself comparing candidate A with candidate B. Candidate A has considerably more publications than candidate B in a comparable amount of time. Furthermore, for each of candidate B's publications, there is a candidate A publication of comparable quality. But candidate A has some mediocre publications (perhaps because they didn't have the luxuries of elite institutional affiliation available to candidate B). In such a case, I've noticed, there is a strong tendency to prefer candidate B. This is a mistake — candidate A may have had to publish her way out of a less privileged situation.

    In general, I've seen people hold publications against someone for an absurd number of years. I know of one case in which someone published an article in her first year of graduate school. The article had the (mis)fortunate to make a small splash. However, it wasn't thought to be a brilliant article, and so for many years afterwards, people associated that person with that article, rather than her subsequent superior work, to the (mild) detriment of her career.

    Reply
  20. Rachel Barney

    I'd add only that if your thesis is on a somewhat esoteric or dull-sounding topic, or one at the fringes of your AOS as standardly conceived, there's something to be said for showing off your breadth early on, and having a good freestanding paper on another topic which you can publish or present at conferences (or even as a job talk) is an excellent way of doing that.

    Reply
  21. Rachel Barney

    I'd add only that if your thesis is on a somewhat esoteric or dull-sounding topic, or one at the fringes of your AOS as standardly conceived, there's something to be said for showing off your breadth early on, and having a good freestanding paper on another topic which you can publish or present at conferences (or even as a job talk) is an excellent way of doing that.

    Reply
  22. Jonathan

    A couple of people have said that whether publishing is important depends on whether the student is at a 'leading graduate institution'.

    So, how does one determine if he's at a leading graduate institution, in this sense? How good is 'leading'? Our host for this thread has given us a nice approximate rank-ordering; where's the cutoff?

    Reply
  23. Joshua Umar

    I am a recent B.A., and am just now applying to philosophy Ph.D. programs, so I hope no one minds me posting here. I think the last question (posted by Jonathan) is a good one. I would be interested to know if, say, Syracuse or Minnesota are considered "leading graduate institutions," or if one needs to look to the likes of a Stanford or Arizona before they apply that designation?

    Reply
  24. Hakeem

    Iam planning on doing a masters in philosophy. However, I come from an engineering background (computer engineering). I have a masters in computer engineering and a diploma in philosophy from the University of London (external program)-equivalent of one year undergrad study in philosophy. Somebody told me to publish something if I want to be accepted. Can anybody tell which journals should I approach so as to increase my chances?. Thanks.

    Reply
  25. Manyul Im

    Hakeem, I don't know who told you that but that's going pretty far overboard. You should have a good chance at getting into all the good terminal M.A. programs if you have a good philosophical writing sample from a course you took and if you have very supportive letters from philosophers from whom you took courses. An engineering background is sometimes looked upon as an added positive factor because you have the sort of skills for analyzing and organizing information that could help you in philosophical writing. At my former institution, Cal State University in Los Angeles–which has a notable and very successful M.A. program as far as placement into PhD programs goes–we would never even have expected an applicant for an M.A. program to have published in philosophy prior to admission. Check out their website for placement, as well as admission, information: http://www.calstatela.edu/dept/phil

    Reply
  26. Ross Cameron

    Absolutely, Hakeem, it sounds like you've been given some pretty bad advice. It's not uncommon for institutions to accept promising students on to their MA programs despite their having little background in philosophy. They'll look at the evidence of your potential; having a publication will certainly not be a pre-requisite. Of course, having a publication in somewhere like the Journal of Philosophy is pretty good (although far from infallible) evidence of potential, but it's certainly not required. And there are plenty of journals such that publishing in them is evidence only of being able to use e-mail or the postal service, so you definitely don't want to try and get something published just for the sake of it.

    Reply

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