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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

The Highest Quality “General” Philosophy Journals in English

Brian Leiter

So with more than 500 votes cast, the earlier poll is now closed.  Here are "the top 19" journals (after which there is a drop-off in votes).  Some useful information here, also some surprises.

1. Philosophical Review  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Journal of Philosophy  loses to Philosophical Review by 275–125
3. Nous  loses to Philosophical Review by 307–118, loses to Journal of Philosophy by 240–183
4. Mind  loses to Philosophical Review by 309–108, loses to Nous by 221–192
5. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research  loses to Philosophical Review by 361–80, loses to Mind by 307–132
6. Australasian Journal of Philosophy  loses to Philosophical Review by 386–65, loses to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research by 327–102
7. Philosophical Studies  loses to Philosophical Review by 277–47, loses to Australasian Journal of Philosophy by 153–143
8. Analysis  loses to Philosophical Review by 384–71, loses to Philosophical Studies by 259–159
9. Philosophical Quarterly  loses to Philosophical Review by 376–57, loses to Analysis by 222–179
10. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society  loses to Philosophical Review by 387–44, loses to Philosophical Quarterly by 273–105
11. Philosophers' Imprint  loses to Philosophical Review by 264–28, loses to Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society by 135–124
12. Philosophical Perspectives  loses to Philosophical Review by 369–27, loses to Philosophers' Imprint by 167–141
13. American Philosophical Quarterly  loses to Philosophical Review by 387–42, loses to Philosophical Perspectives by 138–118
14. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly  loses to Philosophical Review by 410–23, loses to American Philosophical Quarterly by 169–167
15. The Monist  loses to Philosophical Review by 385–38, loses to Pacific Philosophical Quarterly by 199–102
16. Canadian Journal of Philosophy  loses to Philosophical Review by 393–32, loses to The Monist by 161–132
17. Philosophical Topics  loses to Philosophical Review by 379–12, loses to Canadian Journal of Philosophy by 197–112
18. European Journal of Philosophy  loses to Philosophical Review by 265–24, loses to Philosophical Topics by 135–133
19. Ratio  loses to Philosophical Review by 395–22, loses to European Journal of Philosophy by 152–134

Comments are open; only signed comments will be approved (an e-mail is not enough, you must sign your full name to the comment).

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45 responses to “The Highest Quality “General” Philosophy Journals in English”

  1. Paul Raymont

    I'm not sure about this, but I don't think Dialectica was in the poll. It's a good journal which I would put in the top 15. Their site is http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0012-2017

    Also, Grazer Philosophische Studien has had some good issues.

    Reply
  2. Brian Leiter

    There were some other journals that might have been included, though the list was pretty long already–Dialectic is but one. I think it extremely unlikely any of those not included would have out-performed any of the ones ranked, above. They might well have out-perormed some of those included in the study, but not in the "top 19."

    Reply
  3. Jon Cogburn

    Does anyone know why Synthese didn't make the cut?

    Am I wrong to think that just a few years ago it would have made a strong showing?

    Is it that it's so expensive now that many libraries don't order it any more?

    Reply
  4. Brian Leiter

    Jon, Synthese wasn't in this survey since it does not publish in all or even most areas of philosophy. I'll include it in some follow-up survey devoted to journals related to epistemology, philosophy of science, etc.

    Reply
  5. Malte Dahlgrün

    Assuming that the aim was to provide advice to “graduate students and younger philosophers trying to figure out where to publish”, at least two of the journals included in the poll didn’t really belong here. See points 1 and 3 below.

    1. Philosophical Topics expressly refuses to accept any submitted papers, as you can check here:

    http://www.uark.edu/depts/philinfo/pt/oldindex.html

    2. Philosophical Perspectives is an annual publication, obviously. Given that this was included, at least Midwest Studies in Philosophy and Philosophical Issues ought to have been included too.

    3. Again, however, these yearbooks rely heavily on invited papers from established philosophers. They are hardly places for not-yet-established authors to submit papers to for blind review. Midwest Studies write in their 2007 volume that “many” of the papers there are invited. I’m not sure about the situation with Philosophical Perspectives (whose website isn’t accessible at present), but I would guess that they rely at least equally much on invited pieces from established philosophers and perhaps PhD candidates at leading departments with strong recommendations. (Philosophical Issues, which I take to be the weakest of the three, seems to be invitation-only?)

    3. Erkenntnis should have been included in the poll. Not only does this journal cover the whole range of theoretical philosophy, it also accepts papers in, e.g., ethics or legal philosophy. See the perhaps surprisingly inclusive self-description here:

    http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/10670

    Though Erkenntnis would have hardly made it past The Monist or the CJP, it would still have landed inside the selection above. Would have been interesting to see just where.

    4. On a sidenote, I think the selection of journals that were included in the poll outside the top 20 or so was quite arbitrary. But I take it from the remarks above that Brian Leiter shares this assessment himself.

    Reply
  6. Malte Dahlgrün

    Jon Cogburn, Synthese is basically a philosophy of science journal. It's not a "general" philosophy journal.
    I was under the impression that Brian Leiter correctly assumed this too. The omission would be inexplicable otherwise.

    Reply
  7. Brian Leiter

    I don't think the selection outside the top 19 was 'arbitrary,' I do think it was incomplete. Erkenntnis's self-descriptioin does not match what it mostly publishes. Younger philosophers often have the opportunity to publish in places like Philosophical Topics and Philosophical Perspectives (look at recent volumes), so it's useful to know how they 'stack up' (very roughly).

    Reply
  8. Malte Dahlgrün

    Well, I only said "quite arbitrary", and assessing incompleteness in the inclusion of lower-quality journals into the poll comes rather close to what I meant by that.

    Reply
  9. Mohan Matthen

    It's interesting that Philosophical Review is such a clear winner. My impression is that though it publishes in all areas of philosophy, it sticks to a highly aprioristic kind of methodology, and is relatively uninterested in empirically based philosophy — whether in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, or ethics. (I mean philosophy that takes the empirical content of science seriously as providing philosophers with material in support of or against philosophical theses.) If I am right about this, can we conclude that this kind of philosophy is regaining vogue?

    Reply
  10. Christopher Hitchcock

    A semantic note on the phrase "quite arbitrary", the word "quite" has different shades of meaning, and tends to be used differently in British and American English. In American, it usually means "very"; in British, it usually means something like "not completely". A recommendation letter from an American that says someone's work is "quite good" is much stronger that a letter from Britain that says the same thing.

    Reply
  11. Jamie

    Chris, I think that's not quite(!) it.

    In American, 'quite' is often an intensifier but not as strong as 'very'. (Thus, if you're improving you can go from good to quite good to very good.)
    In British it's almost exactly the opposite. It's close to 'rather' or 'pretty' (used as adverbs). So if you're improving you could go from quite good to good to very good.

    On both sides of the Atlantic, it can also mean 'completely' (as when you're not quite ready). How the 'completely' meaning is related to the others is something I've always wondered about.

    Reply
  12. Enzo Rossi

    I sometimes wonder why most top articles in language/epistemology/metaphysics tend to appear in 'generalist' journals, whereas top pieces in moral and political philosophers tend to appear in 'specialist' journals (of course there are plenty of exceptions). That has of course something to do with the fact that generalist journals seem to publish more LEM philosophy than moral or political philosophy. In fact the ratio of LEM vs value theory articles seems disproportionate to the ratio of LEM people vs value theory people in the average philosophy department. Is it the case that LEM is thought to be of broader interest to the wider discipline (a strange thought, given the current trend for strong specialisation)? Or perhaps value theorists prefer to publish in venues that are read by academics in cognate disciplines (politics, law, etc.)?

    Reply
  13. Christopher Hitchcock

    Since the discussion made me curious, I perused the 2008 volumes of Synthese and Erkenntnis. I only looked quickly and my categorization is imperfect, but here is what I found: Synthese — 28 articles in philosophy of science, 25 epistemology, 23 philosophical logic, 17 philosophy of language, 15 metaphysics, 12 philosophy of mind, 6 ethics/social choice, 4 philosophy of math, 4 20th century continental(!), 3 history of analytic; Erkenntnis — 13 philosophy of science, 10 philosophy of math, 6 epistemology, 4 philosophy of language, 4 philosophy of mind, 4 metaphysics, 1 history of analytic.

    While there's a definite skew toward philosophy of science, both publish widely in 'core' analytic philosophy, and even occasionally outside these areas. So I don't think it's quite fair to treat them as specialist journals like Philosophy of Science, or the Journal of Philosophical Logic, although they are not fully general philosophy journals either.

    Reply
  14. Brian Leiter

    They're not "fully general philosophy journals" would be an understatement! They're not as specialized as the two journals you mention, but they're closer to them, than they are to PPR or Phil Review. They don't publish, for example, in core topics in value theory, or at all in the real history of philosophy. Even the "Continental" papers are parts of symposia on philosophy of mind.

    I do appreciate the data, but I think they confirm the wisdom of including them in a survey of journals involving "formal" and science/epistemology areas of our field.

    Reply
  15. Allen Hazen

    There are also "style" differences, so these (even these, general) journals are not exactly competing with each other. The Philosophical Review tends to have long articles with extensive bibliographies; Analysis, in contrast, specializes in short articles, often responses to other short Analysis articles. I think the philosophical community is well-served in having forums for diverse modes like this.

    Reply
  16. Ben C

    Some of the top journals that we might ordinarily count as "fully general philosophy journals" don't publish a lot of history. I think _Analysis_ used to have a policy against it. (Their current policy forbids it only in _Analysis Reviews_: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/analys/for_authors/.) And I have the vague impression that _Mind_ doesn't publish a lot of history.

    Reply
  17. Christopher Hitchcock

    Brian, I'll leave it to you which survey to include them in. For young philosophers working in "core" areas like epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, these are good journals worth thinking about. (And of course they are also good for philosophy of science/math/logic.)

    Enzo Rossi mentions that a disproportionate number of articles in "core" areas are published in "general" journals. This is partly due to a dearth of specialized journals in "core" areas. There's Mind and Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, the Journal of Philosophical Logic (The Review of Metaphysics, despite its name, does not seem to specialize in contemporary analytic metaphysics). My sense is, that with the possible exception of JPL, these don't have the sort of quality or reputation of, say, Ethics or Philosophy and Public Affairs.

    Reply
  18. Chris Bertram

    Yes, if a British person exclaims "quite right!", they mean "completely correct", but if they say that a restaurant is "quite good", they mean that it is only good to a moderate degree. On the other hand, if they say that a piece of sculpture is "quite exquisite", they don't mean "exquisite to a moderate degree" but rather "perfectly exquisite". Quite confusing, really, unless you're a native.

    Reply
  19. David Sobel

    Thanks for running these surveys. Even if one can quibble about exactly which journals were included, the resulting data is quite useful. Obviously your web page gets more philosophers passing through than just about any other place I can think of so it is a good venue for such surveys. Others clearly have lots of energy for post-hoc advice about how to run things that you got started. I wonder if you would welcome those with energy for such things to devise potentially useful polls or whatever that takes advantage of the traffic on your site to send you fully formed posts which you would consider for its merits and send out under their name if you think it worthwhile? Obviously polls which substantially replicate what you have already done would not pass muster, but new ideas for taking advantage of your site could.

    Reply
  20. Christopher Grau

    I had the same question as Malte: if Phil Topics and Phil Perspectives were included, why not Midwest Studies? Was this just a mistake?

    Reply
  21. Brian Leiter

    David, I'd welcome other journal polls. Someone already volunteered to come up with a list of philosophy of mind journals. I'd like to do something similar for other fields. I'm not sure about polls about things other than the journals at this stage, though if you have an idea, e-mail me.

    Reply
  22. Margaret Atherton

    JPhil also refuses to publish history of philosophy and I don't remember seeing any in Nous.

    Reply
  23. Brian Leiter

    I am losing the thread of these comments. JPhil, Nous, Mind, and Analysis are still far broader in their coverage than, e.g., Synthese, even if some of them don't publish purely historical pieces. (Mind, in fact, does publish certain kinds of 'historical' pieces, as long as they aren't purely of antiquarian interest. Nous used to do so, I can't recall whether they have done so more recently.) Phil Review and Philosophers' Imprint and PPR and EJP, by contrast, do publish a fair bit of history.

    Reply
  24. Jon Cogburn

    I think the Synthese thing just took some of us by surprise because we'd really thought of it as a generalist journal. It's kind of a hard case because it's not nearly as specialized as Philosophy of Science or Linguistics and Philosophy (a journal I would rate as highly as JPL, even though it is much more specialized). I bet that the people who thought of Synthese as a general journal tend to restrict their journal reading of general journals to articles in areas covered by Synthese, and so didn't notice that it systematically doesn't cover certain areas.

    I think that this just shows that these distinctions are arguably multi-dimensionally vague. Of course that does not undermine the value of the survey (which, among other things, will be justifiably and helpfully cited in tenure files of candidates who have published in these journals), nor does it entail that the selection was arbitrary.

    Reply
  25. Chris Tucker

    Enzo Rossi wondered "why most top articles in language/epistemology/metaphysics tend to appear in 'generalist' journals, whereas top pieces in moral and political philosophers tend to appear in 'specialist' journals (of course there are plenty of exceptions)." *Perhaps* the below correlation provides a partial answer.

    I did a brief check and I noticed that the editors of the top general journals tend to do research in M &/or E. Even when they had some sort of historical focus, they still tended to publish on M&E questions. Here are some examples:

    The Editor of Nous and PPR: Ernest Sosa seems to do mainly M&E (especially E)
    The Editor of Mind: Thomas Baldwin seems to do a bit of M&E along with his 20th century philosophy and bioethics research. His assistant publishers also seemed interested in metaphysics, at least.
    Phil Studies: Stew Cohen is primarily an epistemologist
    AJP: Stewart Candlish seems to quite a bit of metaphysics.

    Even in this correlation doesn't answer Rossi's question, it does raise further questions:
    1. Why do the editors of top general journals tend to have research interests in M and/or E? Is this a good trend?
    2. To what extent does the specialization(s) of the editor affect what the journal publishes?
    3. To what extent does the specialization(s) of the editor affect what gets sent to the journal? For example, are you more inclined to submit an ethics paper to a journal when you know the editor specializes in ethics?

    Reply
  26. Adrian Bardon

    Synthese has a subtitle identifying it as a journal of "epistemology and methodology and philosophy of science". In addition to a couple of the journals mentioned above, I thought International Philosophical Quarterly and Philosophia should have gotten a chance to compete, and could have made the top 30.

    Reply
  27. Brian Leiter

    There is a reason I only listed the 'top 19': it seems to me those results are more reliable and informative, and that below that, the results deserve even less credence. I'm rather confident none of the omissions would have made the top 19.

    Reply
  28. Colin Koopman

    Why publish these polls when your sample set is self-selecting and as a result not at all representative of the wider philosophical population, which is presumably the relevant population for a survey such as this? What you keep conducting are polls of "Leiter Blog Readers (and their email correspondents)" not polls of "U.S. (and Canadian and British) Philosophers". Why should anyone, especially relatively under-informed graduate students, undergraduates, or junior philosophers such as myself care, at all, about the former sample set given that it is not a reliable proxy for the latter set?

    I worry, in short, that your polls can too easily lead to misinformation (worsened by apparent plans to "justifiably and helpfully cite [them] in tenure files"). But I may be missing something obvious. I would like to submit this to open discussion in hopes that I can be shown the light.

    –A Fellow Leiter Blog Reader Awaiting Enlightenment

    Reply
  29. Brian Leiter

    Indeed, only readers of this blog will reply to the survey. The blog has a lot of readers. 8,000 hits per day (not all of those readers), from all over the world–there are times of day, when 60% of the visitors are from outside the U.S. The survey has been running for multiple days. Probably the results are skewed in this way or that. Still, I assume any intelligent reader will not credit modest differences in the results too much. I, myself, would still submit to Philosopher's Imprint before Phil Studies or Australasian Journal of Phil. I might try Phil Review first, but probably not, since I think on-line publication is better. But I, personally, found the results illuminating as a way to get a very rough picture. Condorcet is hard to game, that's the beauty of it.

    Reply
  30. Jon Cogburn

    I can only speak for myself, but *anybody* I'd get letters of support from for a candidate for promotion or hiring would regard it as a good-making feature of that candidate's file if they'd published in some of the above journals. Likewise, all else being equal, most philosophy professors would regard it as better to publish in one of the above generalist journals rather than in all of the other ones you can find through epistemelinks. I'm sure that many readers of this blog have read and solicited more letters of recommendation and evaluation than I have, but I'm pretty confident the overwhelming majority would agree with me, and that in part their votes were based on the consensus from reading these letters.

    Assuming that it is correct that this list jives with the intuitions of so many people who don't read this blog, then it might follow that the burden of proof is on one who thinks the sample bias is bad.

    This isn't to say that Analysis is certainly better than Philosophical Quarterly, but nobody would cite the fact that it scored one better as proof of anything. But the fact that the readership of this blog ranked them among the top 19 does seem to me to be predictive of academic consensus. Likewise, nobody would cite this review of general journals to say that a person who has published in a lot of logic journals does not deserve hiring or promotion (albeit, all else being equal, it usually is better if the specialist can publish in generalist journals as well).

    All this being said, Koopman may have a point that citing the above in a tenure letter may be badly circular. Suppose that Leonard Peikoff's Randroids took over the voting in the same way they did for the widely circulated internet poll of greatest books a few years ago [they cleared their cookies (this was before browsers made it easy to do so) so that they could vote again and again for Atlas Shrugged; my friends and I responded by doing the same for P.G. Wodehouse, but Bertie Wooster sadly proved to be no match for the Objectivists). If as a result the Randroid approved list did not jive with most letter writers' intuitions, then nobody would cite it. So maybe the intuitions are doing all the work in any case.

    Oh well. It's still an interesting fact that the voting did so closely match up with the consensus you get after reading thousands of letters of recommendation.

    Reply
  31. Brian Leiter

    Regarding Midwest Studies, I should make clear that I had thought it was moribund, and that turns out to be an error, needles to say. So if we were doing it again, I would have put it in.

    Reply
  32. Observer

    One important note to readers of this poll:

    The Australasian Journal of Philosophy occupies the ordinal rank above because of what can only be interpreted as systematic voting in its favor between Professor Leiter’s posting of the intermediate poll result (when about 400 votes had been cast) and the final posting of the poll results (when about 500 votes had been cast). While not a single one of the other journals in the top 15 changed its rank anymore after the intermediate post, the AJP immediately pulled past Analysis and almost completely bridged a massive gap between it and Phil. Studies. It trailed Phil. Studies closely for days until, on the last day, it suddenly pulled ahead of Phil. Studies by a margin not remotely like anything observed in earlier days.

    Some might say that the exact ordinal rank does not matter, or that the whole ranking is not that important. But surely that’s not the case (as the AJP supporters in the later stages of this poll will be quick to acknowledge). First of all, there could hardly be a ranking of more importance to graduates and professors than a ranking of professional journals. Secondly, we all know that Professor Leiter’s blog is by some distance the most influential philosophy blog on the web. Lots of important information for professional philosophers gets collected here that simply isn’t available anywhere else (just think of the information about tenure-track hirings). Thirdly, there is no other significant journal ranking on the web at present, as far as I can see.

    The point is that once a ranking of journals has been published in a forum like this one, very many people will take it very seriously, and they will get back to it again and again. Whether or not you yourself are an experienced philosopher who can take an abnormality or two in this ranking which a grain of salt, many others *cannot*.

    I take it that the intermediate result was pretty representative of the implicit consensus in the profession: The topmost flight is firmly occupied by a group of four journals, and just below these you get PPR and Phil Studies (and probably Philosophers’ Imprint, in fact – but Professor Leiter has already expressed his surprise at the surprisingly low rank of this journal in the present poll). The AJP is in the top 10, but hardly #6. This Condorcet poll was in principle a rather successful reflection of the professional consensus. It’s a shame that the distortion above occurred.

    Reply
  33. Ben C

    Brian —

    I should have been clearer. I wasn't disputing the exclusion of _Synthese_; I was pointing out that some generalist journals are not quite as generalist as one might have thought (or at least as I had once thought), and I thought this information might be helpful to those starting out in the profession who have a serious interest in history.

    Reply
  34. John Turri

    What's with the speculative, anonymous accusations about underhanded distortion?

    "The Australasian Journal of Philosophy occupies the ordinal rank above because of what can only be interpreted as systematic voting in its favor …. It's a shame that the distortion above occurred."

    Brian, is there any actual evidence for the "distortion" hypothesis in the raw data (ISP addresses, voting from specific institutions, etc)? After you said "only signed comments will be approved … you must sign your full name to the comment," one might get the impression that this comment was approved because you thought it had some merit. Maybe you could clear this up.

    Reply
  35. Nathan Hanna

    Brian Weatherson did a journals survey a while back. I've often found it helpful. The results don't seem significantly different (at least from what I can see with a quick glance).

    http://brian.weatherson.org/journals/Journals_Survey.htm

    Reply
  36. Christopher Hitchcock

    It seems clear that 'general' and 'specialized' are not values of a dichotomous variable, but rather stand on a continuum. As a crude measure, we can assign to each journal a 'Leiter width' or LW, based on the number of the 32 specialty areas in the Leiter report in which a journal publishes papers. Some examples: Studia Leibniziana, < 1; Philosophia Mathematica, 1; British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 7; Synthese, 14; Analysis, 21; Philosophical Review, 32?. (In theory the PR publishes in all areas of philosophy; in practice, as Mohan Matthen notes, they haven't published in e.g. philosophy of physics or philosophy of biology for many years. There may well be other areas in which they haven't published in a while.)

    Also, the rankings of the general journals do not tell us whether (just to speculate) philosophers of science prefer JP to PR, while historians of philosophy prefer PR to JP, and so on.

    Reply
  37. Christopher Hitchcock

    In answer to Chris Tucker's post, I don't think that the area in which an editor works has a strong effect on the content of a journal. An editor's selections are fairly tightly constrained by the submissions she receives and the referee's reports. If anything, I would expect them yo be related as effects of a common cause: one is likely to assume the editorship only of a journal that regularly published in one's own area, and authors decide where to submit their papers on the same the basis.

    Reply
  38. Brian Leiter

    John, I'm afraid I lose track of the commenting rules on particular threads; the person, above, did use a real e-mail. I don't particularly think the charge has any merit, maybe AJP should be #6 maybe it should be #10–I hardly think the relative placement matters at all. A consequence of my fairly laissez-faire comment policy is that lots of comments appear with which I don't agree. If turns out readers don't understand that, I may have to revise them rather dramatically!

    Reply
  39. John Turri

    Thanks, Brian, that clears things up. Your laissez-faire policy is good — the comment boards are almost always intelligent and helpful — so no dramatic revisions, please.

    Reply
  40. Steve Finlay

    A possible innocent explanation of AJP's late surge in the rankings: Australia/New Zealand are 3+ hours behind the US (but a day ahead). I don't know exactly when the poll closed, but it's to be expected that Australasian voters would look on the AJP more favourably on average than US voters. That may be a bias, but so is the preference of US voters for Phil Studies over AJP (or for US journals in general over 'international' journals; see the contrasting biases on each side of the Atlantic regarding Nous vs. Mind).

    Reply
  41. Brandon Towl

    As quoted in the earlier poll:
    "This topic comes up quite a lot, especially in correspondence, and especially from graduate students and younger philosophers trying to figure out where to publish."

    While journal rankings can indeed be helpful to said young philosophers, there are other pieces of information that, I feel, would be more helpful to this group. It would be good to have some data gathered, for example, on the following:

    **Average turn-around time for journals. If I am looking to get a paper published before the next job market round, I would gladly submit to a lower-ranked journal with a quick turn-around time than a prestigious journal with a 1-year turn around.

    **Journals that encourage new/young authors (especially if this is explicit). IIRC, Philosophical Research, for example, is explicit in this. But other journals might encourage newcomers as well.

    **Journals that accept responses to pieces in other journals and/or unsolicited book reviews. This topic has appeared on this blog before, but it would be handy to have together with the other pieces of information.

    **Journals that publish similar papers (or in similar areas). If my paper gets rejected by a prestigious journal, where do I go next? Presumably, going down the list would not be a good idea. But knowing that, say, Phil Studies is very similar to Phil review might provide some guidance.

    Again, these are just a few ideas. The ranking information is helpful, but I thought it would be good to suggest some other ways that the community at large could help new philosophers.

    Reply
  42. Josh S.

    What features, exactly, should we be considering when ranking journals?

    Is the idea to identify the journal such that the probability of finding an article that is worth reading is greater if we were to open it than if were to open any other journal? If so, are we to rely only on the journal’s track record or are we to consider the list of referees?

    Should we take into account factors other than the quality of articles that are published, e.g. the typical time from submission to decision?

    I sheepishly admit to having submitted a ranking without having first answered any of these questions. When I ranked, I think I was just invoking a vague sense of which journals are considered most prestigious (whatever that means). It is only after I submitted my ranking that I began to wonder what features of journals the rankings are supposed to reflect.

    That said, I do think that ranking things is fun, even if I don’t know what, exactly, I am basing my rankings on.

    Reply
  43. Christopher Hitchcock

    Following up on Brandon Towl's post, another factor is the cost of a journal. Springer (née Kluwer) journals (e.g. Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, Synthese) are very expensive; as a result, few individuals subscribe, and many libraries are cutting them out as well. Philosopher's Imprint is freely available on the internet. This will obviously have an effect on readership size.

    Another factor is whether the journal has length limits, and whether they are rigorously enforced. Analysis, in particular, has a very strict length limit.

    Note also that some of the good-making features of journals described by Towl contribute causally to the quality of the content of a journal by attracting good submissions. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science has substantially improved in quality since it decided to adopt and rigorously enforce a policy of quick notification of decisions. Philosopher's Imprint has become a strong journal in a very short time because of the appeal of quick publication.

    All that said, it can still be very important to understand the relative standing of various journals. Untenured faculty need to understand the expectations at their schools. Some schools have a bean-counting mentality: they want n publications in peer-reviewed journals, no matter the quality. However, at most strong departments at research-oriented schools, it matters a great deal where one publishes. I can use as an example my own school, Caltech, which does not have a graduate program and so does not get a Leiter ranking, but which strives for excellence and maintains high standards. If someone were to come up for tenure with a long string of publications, but none in (say) the top 10 general journals or the top specialty journals (and no book with a leading press), there would be a strong presumption that the candidate's work was not good enough to be accepted at the top journals (or presses), and s/he would have a very hard time getting tenure. So at Caltech, and schools like it, frequently submitting work to lower-ranked journals because of faster turn-around times or higher probability of acceptance would be a losing strategy.

    Reply
  44. pascal engel

    Thanks to Paul Raymont for having mentionned Dialectica and Grazer philosophische Studien. I am surprised too that these two did not figure in your initial list, which could also have included Theoria, the main analytical journal in Scandinavia. There is some tension , to say the least, about launching a poll, and relying only upon one's hunch about which journals are to be included at the start. Dialectica is today among the important journals publishing analytic philosophy in English. It publishes in most domains of philosophy ( possibly with the exception of applied ethics and the history of philosophy).It has raised both its readership and its submission rate significantly during the recent years, and if you have a look at the table of contents you would see that although it is based in continental Europe (in Switzerland) it publishes papers coming from all the English speaking world. Would it have been included in the top 20 if it had had a chance to run ? I do not know. I am not opposed to polls and rankings, but they should be at least ( attempting to be) objective in the initial sample !
    Recently in Europe there has been a heated debate about evaluations and rankings of journals. I have written in the last issue of Dialectica an editorial about this ( "Measure for measure") , to which I allow myself to refer.

    http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122267690/abstract

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  45. Brian Leiter

    Theoria was included in the poll, but, unfortunately, did not come close to the top 19. Given the readership of the blog, I would expect Dialectica would have fared similarly, even if it would have fared better among a purely European audience.

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