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Putting drafts of work on-line?

Brian Leiter

A graduate student writes:

What do people think of grad students making their work available online early in their careers? It seems pretty common for students still doing coursework to post paper drafts on Academia.edu, even when the drafts are far from publishable, and I'm not sure if the potential advantages outweigh the potential costs. Having your name known is probably good, as are generating interest in your research, starting conversations with people working in the same area, and maybe showcasing your potential; on the other hand giving people a preview of your immature work might cut the other way if rather than recognizing in it scholarly potential they just see bad grad student papers. Having early drafts online also means that reviewers for a journal can google the title of your paper and see who wrote it, thereby removing anonymity. I recently had a paper of mine show up in a collection of links on a blog I'd never heard of and suddenly Academia.edu was informing me of dozens of views per day. For a moment I was excited, but then I remembered that people were reading a hastily-composed workshop draft. I think the ideas and prose represent me well but there are sections missing and the argument needs substantial work (as I learned when certain parts of it got shredded at the workshop). I thought about taking the paper down and leaving just an abstract, or removing it altogether, but I never made it past worrying. Did I err in leaving it up for public scrutiny?

We did touch on aspects of this topic briefly once before, but these questions are more specific.  I'll note that this is a major issue in academic law because of the substantial use of SSRN.  The question there is when junior faculty or job seekers should put their work on-line; my advice is not to put anything on-line until they think it's ready to be submitted for publication.   The reason is simple:  first impressions are sticky, and if you put a half-baked piece of work on-line, you're unlikely to get a second chance with that reader.  I think the same advice applies to grad students–great to put work on-line that's at a stage where you and the faculty you work with think it's ready (or very close to ready) for submission to a journal, otherwise not.

What do readers think?   Faculty, please use your name; students may use a distinctive pseudonym, but must include a valid e-mail address, which will not appear.

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12 responses to “Putting drafts of work on-line?”

  1. Moti Mizrahi

    For what it’s worth, my personal experience suggests that there is another problem with putting drafts of work on-line, especially on blogs. Some people will proceed to comment on the paper, for whatever reason (e.g., the paper’s thesis is at odds with their pet theory), without even reading the paper first. The problem is that other lazy readers might form an erroneous (but sticky) first impression of the paper’s content on the basis of an unconsidered comment, especially if the commentator is the author’s senior. I'm not sure what can be done about that. But I think that grad students and other early-career people should be aware of that.

    Reply
  2. P.D. Magnus

    I think that having drafts on-line is probably a good thing.

    Yes, journal referees could conceivable look you up and break anonymity. Malfeasant referees are unpredictable jerks, though, and you shouldn't plan your life around them.

    I think it can make sense to put conference papers on-line, as well, provided "the ideas and prose represent [you] well". Include a comment at the beginning of the file that explains the context; e.g., say it's a conference paper and that the argument is importantly incomplete. A conference paper is a lot like a blog post. It can be evidence of your philosophical acumen, provided the reader doesn't look for it to meet the standards of a journal article.

    As a final note: Also leave your final drafts on-line when your paper is published in a journal. There will be philosophers who aren't at an institution that subscribes to the journal or who encounter a reference to your paper when they don't have a connection to their campus library. Some will request via interlibrary loan or get it later when they are on campus, but others will not. Those latter readers are lost by not having your final draft on-line.

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  3. Alexander Stingl

    I think that I can speak from an interdisciplinary point of view here, which includes philosophy but extends to STS, sociology, and a few attached fields.

    Making work available is problematic, when you use a forum that a lot of people frequent, for the very reason Brian Leiter mentions.
    With theory-laden papers, the problem is that readers may be miffed because of lacking coherence, with empirical papers, because data is still too raw and inconclusive, methods not well refined, etc.
    This calls perhaps for more (under)graduate journals with senior reviewers and 'publication mentoring', which would be awesome but, well, not in this current politico-economic climate in higher education (I tried something like this in a pilot project, despite some small successes, I had to put it on hiatus for now) .
    As for academia.edu, if people are anything like me, I joined academia.edu originally to get a better view of what people interested in the same topic as I were doing. Now I am swamped with news about undergraduate papers in those fields – which I am just not interested in. That doesn't mean that these papers may not be interesting or are bad papers, but I can't sift through hundreds of unergrad/grad student papers on Kant/biology/medicine when I am interested in the 20-30 experts in this area, and in experts on another 20 to 30 keywords. (Perhaps there are better filters, or should be, etc.)
    My advice is, if you have something that you need to be accessible for potential employers, create your own website and upload it there. Where necessary mark it clearly as draft or have your adviser take a look if possible. If it is draft, allow for a way to comment on it, and make that clearly visible. Use blog for less 'well-baked' stuff, and mark your posts as 'experiments' or early drafts of sections, and such, also invite friends, colleagues, and faculty to comment on those while working towards publication. If your piece is worthy and you are making connections, people may give good comments. Potential employers who are seriously interested in you may check your blog and even take notice of the fact that you generate active discussions on materials you are working on.
    But I think you should never ever put something 'out there' that you can't fully own or that your advisers think of as half-baked.

    For anything empirical, specifically quantitative data-driven, let me re-emphasize, it is deadly to put up anything where the numbers don't add up. I know students who had their career killed because of stunts like that, even in cases where it it was a senior co-author putting it out there in a semi-public forum, having nothing to do with the co-authoring student.

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  4. Grad student

    I submitted an unpublished paper to an institution in order to be considered for a pre-doctoral fellowship. I had never submitted it elsewhere. I had not even shown it to someone else. I received a phone interview but was eventually declined the fellowship. Less than a year later a shockingly similar paper (whole paragraphs were identical) that one of the committee members supposedly authored was published in a fairly good journal. I had no way to prove that the paper was mine though. A friend told me that if I had posted it on SSRN, then I would have had proof that it was my work (with a time-date signature). Is this true? To this day, I still see this scholar at conferences and have to be nice, since I cannot make the accusation without proof. It would be my word against hers. And she is a highly respected scholar, while I'm just a nobody grad student.

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  5. upset

    Grad Student, if you sent the paper by e-mail to the institution you should have all the proof you need. Search your messages sent box. This is an alarming story!

    Reply
  6. Alexander Stingl

    Wow. This is not the first time that I have heard stories like that, of course. Last year, I witnessed how a famous scholar took very detailed notes on her smart-phone at a conference watching over a grad student's shoulder, who was working on a presentation – I alerted her to that.

    I hope that people on this forum, perhaps Brian himself, might be able to help you, and make sure that it gets exposed, if that is what you'd like t do – although there may always be backlash, too. I'd be willing to at least look at it, if you like, and give you my thoughts (you can contact me via the website listed with my name), but I am not strictly situated in American philosophy, but an international and interdisciplinary postdoc researcher.
    However, I do feel that such matters should be investigated and pursued.

    Reply
  7. John Turri

    This one is easy. For drafts that are "far from publishable," the downside far outweighs the upside. Don't publish it online.

    For most graduate students, most drafts that they think are publishable are far from publishable. So, for most graduate students, even for drafts that they think are publishable, I'd advise considerable caution.

    I'm sure that there are all kinds of individual differences on this issue, but even at my stage in my career, I wouldn't put online anything that wasn't in very advanced and polished form. Aside from giving a bad impression, there's enough garbage out there as it is. Why add to it?

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  8. FritzJMcDonald

    Posting "far from publishable," "half-baked" papers, or even worse "garbage" online seems to be a bad idea. One definitely should not put everything one has written, regardless of quality, online.

    Still, aren't there some potential benefits to posting work that might not be publishable yet but is still polished, good, and nearly publishable? If one has helpful friends (or followers) on networks like academia.edu, one might receive good comments that could help the work become publishable. (Friends of mine sometimes post links to their work in progress on Facebook or Twitter to seek comments). If a young philosopher has gained some attention in the community, she might even get helpful comments from kind strangers. For search committees, seeing more good, polished, nearly publishable work might give a good impression of a promising, productive scholar rather than a sticky, bad impression of a candidate.

    Good work posted online might lead to invited presentations and publications. Anecdotally, one of my papers was posted online by a graduate student conference. I had not even realized it was online. The paper was read and discussed by some people in the field. This led to a conference invitation, and ultimately it led to publication of a revised version of the paper. This was a great benefit to me at an early stage of my career.

    Reply
  9. Neil Van Leeuwen

    I think if you set expectations appropriately, it would greatly mitigate the problems you're worried about.

    For example, writing "Work in Progress. Comments Welcome!" on the title page could help. What makes you look bad is not that your papers go through a drafty stage. That's everyone. It's when you think your stuff is great when it isn't (yet). So as long as your readers know that you know the thing is a work in progress, you should be okay. At least you would be with me.

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  10. Rachel McKinnon

    One place that I've experimented with putting work-in-progress "online" is Facebook (with my 'Friends' setting on: I don't post "publicly"). I've sometimes posted a paragraph, or a couple paragraphs, of a sticky section of a paper/chapter that I'm working on for people's comment. I've found this to be extremely useful: sometimes the feedback is a bunch of 'likes', other times it's a heated discussion, sometimes even including some useful references I hadn't considered. So this is an alternative option, and it's one that I'm seeing more people use.

    Reply
  11. va

    W. V. Quine (Theories and Things):

    The mass of professional journals is so indigestible and so little worth digesting that the good papers, though more numerous than ever, are increasingly in danger of being overlooked. We cope with the problem partly by ignoring the worst journals and partly by scanning tables of contents for respected names. Since the stratification of the journals from good to bad is imperfect, this procedure will miss an occasional good paper by an unknown author.

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  12. Paul Gowder

    For grad student: the fellowship administrators may also keep copies of applications. If I were in your place, I'd call and casually ask on some pretext, and if they say yes, file a complaint immediately (the idea being that even if the committee member were somehow enough of a scuzzball to destroy the evidence, that would be impossible after going public.)

    Reply

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