Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Fool's avatar
  2. Santa Monica's avatar
  3. Charles Bakker's avatar
  4. Matty Silverstein's avatar
  5. Jason's avatar
  6. Nathan Meyvis's avatar
  7. Stefan Sciaraffa's avatar

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

Posting papers on one’s website as a grad student and granting permission to cite?

Brian Leiter

A philosophy PhD student writes:

I host a few of my papers on a personal website, mainly as a convenient way to share them with friends and colleagues. Lately, a few people have found my papers through search engines and emailed me for permission to cite them. I'm not sure how I should respond to this. None of these papers are currently published, although they are all pieces I would consider preparing for publication. Are there significant risks involved in allowing unpublished work to be cited? Given that these papers are evidently being read already, I worry that refusing permission now would just lead to my work being used without credit. Do others have experience with this kind of situation? What is the best thing to do at this stage?

I would appreciate your advice or that of your readers.

Leave a Reply to P.D. Magnus Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

15 responses to “Posting papers on one’s website as a grad student and granting permission to cite?”

  1. Paul Gowder

    I have to confess that I've never thought that permission was something that must be given in order to cite. (It's a courtesy, perhaps, but that's it.)

    That being said, it appears unlikely that this could be harmful. What's the worst that can happen, someone criticizes the student's argument, perhaps harshly? That doesn't seem that bad; my guess is it would come off as bullying and not be that big a deal on the job market, since people get that one's grad school drafts are not one's best work. (Then again, maybe I am unduly idealistic.)

    BL COMMENT: Many people post drafts saying, "Please do not cite without permission." I do this when it is very much work in progress and material someone might want to cite might turn out to be material that gets cut from the final version.

    Reply
  2. Eli Weber

    This isn't a risk that's associated with citations, but posting unpublished manuscripts to one's website can sometimes interfere with the blind review process when these papers are submitted for publication consideration. Since the original poster is a graduate student, it might be worthwhile for them to consider this before posting unpublished work. Some reviewers may be biased by the fact that the author is a graduate student, and although it would be nice if people didn't Google the titles of articles they're asked to review, we know that they do it somewhat frequently. So perhaps there are other risks associated with posting unpublished work as a grad student that are more serious than concerns about citation.

    Reply
  3. P.D. Magnus

    The alternative is what? The person who would cite you instead is inspired by you but doesn't mention it. It's better you should get credit for whatever influence you had on them.

    If the work is likely to change a lot, you might ask them not to quote you directly. But I don't see why you wouldn't let them paraphrase.

    Reply
  4. Kate Norlock

    All web content is published. It is tricky to put something on the web and also maintain that it is unpublished. I completely understand sharing something online for the convenience, and I recklessly do the same, but if one has any hesitations about one's online content being cited, then it seems one should either not post the papers, or one should include a header with something like the language Brian mentions. It's no surprise that people with similar interests would find the papers in search-results (it would be more surprising if they didn't).

    The only risk I can imagine is that someone will be inspired to write a peer-reviewed publication based on the student's online paper, and then be the first to get into a journal the insights that the student had earlier. So there's a risk someone else will be cited more often for the "earlier" peer-reviewed publication. (I realize that philosophy doesn't have the citation-rates of other fields, and most of us aren't exactly scooping other philosophers with fast-moving and earth-shattering news.)

    I recently cited a paper by Eric Schwitzgebel that I found online, and it didn't even occur to me to email him and ask permission. He's established, so maybe that's why I didn't hesitate, but I also assumed an online paper is being offered to all. (Thanks for posting your papers, Eric!)

    Could the PhD student, if you read this, explain to us why you would *not* want your online working-paper cited? There's something I'm not understanding about your reservations.

    Reply
  5. P.D. Magnus

    Eli Weber writes, "Some reviewers may be biased by the fact that the author is a graduate student, and although it would be nice if people didn't Google the titles of articles they're asked to review, we know that they do it somewhat frequently."

    Do we know that? I suspect that the worry that a reviewer will both search out the draft and be biased against the paper is just a presumption of folk sociology.

    Reply
  6. PhD Student

    Kate Norlock, I had two main concerns: (i) Allowing work that is still not fully developed to be circulated to a wide audience, especially to people who may consider giving me a job one day, and (ii) whether allowing my work to be cited at this stage could interfere with publishing it in the future.

    Reply
  7. Moti Mizrahi

    P.D. This addresses your question:
    http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/12/the-journal-reviewing-process-isnt-anonymous-did-you-really-think-it-was-think-again.html

    Reply
  8. philosopher

    PhD Student: If you do not want your ideas circulating to a wide audience, do not post them on the web. And, yes, PhD students and others should be concerned about what they have posted on the web. All you need is one person on a hiring committee to raise a concern about something on the web about a candidate for the candidate to fall off the list of serious candidates for consideration. There are far too many qualified candidates out there for someone to want to go to the wall over someone who others have raise concerns about.
    P.D. Magnus: Bravo. Like you I am also a bit skeptical of the popular folk psychology around refereeing. I am far too busy to track down authors of manuscripts I review. Indeed, I referee enough that I sometimes barely remember the papers I have refereed in the past.

    Reply
  9. TParent

    For unpublished work, I prefer someone to ask for permission before citing. One reason is simply because the work might not yet reflect my final, considered view. And who wants to be represented in the literature by a straw-person version of their view?
    Also, discussion with potential respondents is a great chance to ferret out errors. It's not as if the goal here is to preempt any possible critique; I may have a genuine disagreement with someone. But I would hate to be criticized for something silly, which I myself would have recognized as a mistake.

    Reply
  10. Eli Weber

    I'm not sure we need to know this definitively to recognize it as a risk not worth taking. Anecdotally, I know that when I've submitted papers for publication, I've often received Academia.edu notifications indicating that someone has Googled the exact title of the paper I've submitted. In the past, when those manuscripts have been online, this gives them my identity, and my manuscript is no longer receiving a blind review. I know many other people who have had the same experience. So do we know that some reviewers Google the title of articles before they review them? Yes, I think we do.

    As for whether it will bias the reviewer, maybe it will, maybe it won't, and maybe it will without the reviewer realizing it. But given the job market and the importance of having publications these days, why would you take the chance? I don't want to derail the thread here, so I won't comment about this again, my point was just that there are some other risks involved with posting unpublished work as a grad student, and I don't think the benefits outweigh those risks.

    Reply
  11. Jonathan Birch

    One important reason for putting 'please do not cite without permission' on your drafts is that the draft may continue to circulate after the paper is published, and you don't want people continuing to cite a draft manuscript at that point. If they ask for permission, you get a chance to give them the correct citation details.

    I don't understand why one would ever refuse permission, provided the citation details are correct. I think the concerns of "PhD student" are misplaced; all the danger lies in posting the draft online in the first place, not in allowing it to be cited.

    Reply
  12. P.D. Magnus

    To focus on the two questions that PhD student poses:
    (i) It could hurt you to circulate papers which are early-days and half-baked. Later drafts of clever papers that people want to cite are to your credit.
    (ii) Lots of papers which are cited as unpublished work are subsequently published. This was true before the internet, when people circulated drafts among their friends and presented early versions at conferences. And it remains true now, when drafts might be discovered on your website by strangers. Journals would happily publish the version-of-record for a paper that's going to be cited a lot! There might (as Eli worries) be some effect due to breaches of blind refereeing, but we only have anecdotes and hunches about the magnitude and even the direction of those effects.

    Reply
  13. Kate Norlock

    Thanks for responding, PhD student. How I would like to resist (ii) being a big problem. I see it's possible that philosophers will hold the existence of an early undercooked working paper against one, but if they do, then that's so unreasonable. After all, surely most of us have early versions of our works before we have polished versions, except for the rare Mozarts among us who just poop finished philosophical papers. But I see your point, and what unreasonable hiring committee members might think is weighty, as they hold employment in their potentially punitive hands. (Even if I find such judgments worthless, they could be terribly powerful.)

    That's too bad, because one of the best things about philosophy in the Internet age is the freedom some of us enjoy to put our imperfect drafts online. I agree with other commenters that (i) is already accomplished, but now that you might be thinking of removing your online works, depending on their states, consider leaving one or more up with a caveat such as, "This is not yet fully developed." There is something to be said for making connections with other philosophers online and sharing ideas, getting your place in a wider conversation established early. Our conventions regarding the preciousness of anonymous peer-review pre-date the Internet, and like other commenters above, I believe they are changing and should change.

    As a student, you may not be in a position to contribute to those changes. But do consider that being publicly imperfect may generate other benefits, such as inclusion in philosophical conversations that we may not know you could be a part of if we didn't find your work online.

    Reply
  14. another PhD student

    I have been concerned for awhile now about the blind peer review process, given the ease of googling paper titles. I hadn't read the Brogaard post (mentioned above, with the url reproduced below) before, but it just compounded my worries. I would be interested in how people think this issue might be avoided going forward, as it will only get worse if we don't do something about it now.

    I had thought that omitting the title of the paper to be reviewed would do the job, but from Berit's post it looks like that is not enough. Brian, perhaps you could dedicate a separate post to how this issue might be resolved, given its importance?

    http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/12/the-journal-reviewing-process-isnt-anonymous-did-you-really-think-it-was-think-again.html

    BL COMMENT: If others want, we can open a thread just on this. I'm skeptical about Brit's account–it is, as noted earlier, anecdotal, but it may be the practices she describes, which undermine blind review, are widespread. Thoughts from others? A separate thread? You can e-mail me directly too.

    Reply
  15. Dale Miller

    Just because one sees searches for the titles of papers which one has submitted to journals doesn't mean that one's work isn't getting a blind review. Reviewers may be Googling after their reviews have already been submitted. I've done this, when I was confident that I wouldn't be reviewing a revised version of the paper.

    Reply

Designed with WordPress