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Detailed submissions data for journals–sources?

Brian Leiter

Philipp Blum, editor of dialectica, writes:

I think it would be very helpful if philosophy journals would make publicly available much more information on acceptance rates and submission statistics. At dialectica, we have been doing this for the last 14 years:

http://www.philosophie.ch/dialectica/

http://www.philosophie.ch/dialectica/dialectica_statistics.pdf

The main points are:

– The acceptance rate over the last ten years is 8.36% (2320 submissions, of which 194 were accepted).

– In 2013, we published 28 articles and a total of 611 pages (549 excluding commissioned book reviews). Of 298 articles submitted in 2013,

34 were accepted.

– Our turn-around time is reasonably quick (median of 3 months) and our backlog is small (currently accepted papers are published in 4/2014).

– Between 2007 and 2013, 28% of our submissions came from people working in the US, 20% from the UK, 6% from both Germany and Canada, 5% from Italy, 4% from Spain, and 3% from each of Australia, Spain and Switzerland. 12% of the submissions came from Asia (mostly Israel, China, Iran and Hong Kong) and only 1% from Africa.

– Currently, about 12% of our submissions are authored by women. This has been constant over the last 14 years and is surprising, given that about a third of PhDs and a quarter of jobs in philosophy are (held) by women. The acceptance rate of female submissions (16%) is higher than the one of male submissions (14%).

The only other two bits of information I know of are:

– AJP: around 600 submissions a year – cf.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.2013.850805#.U7K6oahhvgX

– Mind: around 350 submissions a year, cf. http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ Does anyone know about others? I have heard that the Philosophy Documentation Center has information on acceptance rates, but my institution is not subscribed to it. Does anyone know whether that information is in the public domain? If so, I'd be very interested.

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12 responses to “Detailed submissions data for journals–sources?”

  1. Jonathan Birch

    Andrew Cullison has some interesting unofficial data based on questionnaires filled in by authors:

    http://www.andrewcullison.com/journal-surveys/

    Some of the sample sizes are quite impressive, though it's hard to evaluate the overall reliability of the data. There are some surprising quirks, such as a 21.6% acceptance rate for J.Phil, compared to just 3.9% for Phil. Review.

    Reply
  2. David Velleman

    Philosophers' Imprint posts real-time statistics at: https://webapps.itcs.umich.edu/blogic/Imprint/submissions/statistics.php . (Wait for the page to load: the statistics are being computed.)

    Some high- (or low-)lights:

    — At the present rate, we will receive over 510 submissions this year — 35% more than in 2011, almost 90% more than in 2009.

    — 45% of our invitations to referee are declined.

    Taken together, these two statistics are very troubling. The visibility and reputation of the Imprint hasn't changed in the last two years, so the increase in submissions must have some other cause. I suspect that it is partly due to the rapidly increasing pressure on graduate students to publish — a trend that I also observed in my department's entry-level search this year. I think this trend is bad for the students and bad for the discipline, but that's a different discussion. (No, I don't know how many of our submissions come from graduate students.)

    I don't have yearly statistics on the rate of refusal to referee. (I'll get to work on that.) I believe that an increase in submissions like ours has been experienced by many other journals, and that philosophers are consequently being asked to referee more and more. So it would be understandable if the rate of refusal went up.

    Finally, I should note that one of the cumulative statistics — average time from final submission to publication — does not reflect our current rate of publication. In the first 6.5 months of 2014, we have published as many papers as we published in all of 2013, and our publication backlog is now down to 2. So that (admittedly embarrassing) statistic is rapidly falling.

    Reply
  3. David Velleman

    PS: I've computed the rate of refusal to referee, and it hasn't changed over the past 5 years

    Reply
  4. Tad Schmaltz

    Journal of the History of Philosophy posts submission statistics, acceptance rates, average time from submission to decision and average time from acceptance to publication at: http://philosophy.wisc.edu/jhp/submissions.html.

    Reply
  5. Thom Brooks

    The Philosophy Documentation Center publishes two excellent reference volumes each year: the first covers the US and Canada; the second everywhere else. These books include information about every department (who's in them, how to contact, etc.), every philosophical society, every publisher and every journal (with annually updated information about numbers of submissions, acceptance rates, etc.). I must thank Dermot Moran at UCD for introducing me to them – and they came in very handy when thinking about publishing, as well as my putting together the Journal of Moral Philosophy.

    Reply
  6. Mark van Roojen

    Ethics has published statistics rather regularly including figures on time to decision. The latest version I've found in a quick look is that the October 2013 issue has information on 2011 and 2012.

    Reply
  7. Enzo Rossi

    I recently took over as co-editor of the European Journal of Political Theory: ejpt.sagepub.com

    Our acceptance rate at the last census was 11.6% (and declining). The average time from submission to first decision was 43.72 days.

    We just implemented a triple-blind review system (editors don't know the authors' identities), and we plan to collect gender/country data to compare with the journal's previous record (it was founded in 2002) and with overall trends in philosophy and politics.

    Reply
  8. Karen Bennett

    Phil Review received at least 575 submissions in 2013. Like David Velleman said about Philosopher's Imprint, the number of submissions has been increasing drastically over the past couple of years.

    Here are some more detailed statistics for 2012 (thanks to Matti Eklund for compiling them last summer).

    We received 471 mss all in all. (21 of which were resubmissions.)
    369 were rejected without comments. (78.3%)
    53 were rejected with comments from at least one non-editor referee. (11.3%)
    10 were rejected with comments from editors only. (2.1%)
    11 were encouraged weakly (2.3%)
    9 were encouraged moderately (1.9%)
    2 were encouraged strongly (0.4%)
    [In total 4.7% of all submissions were encouraged.]
    3 were conditionally accepted (0.6%)
    12 were accepted (2.5%)
    1 was withdrawn

    [If a ms was first encouraged and then a revised version accepted, then it counts as two separate submissions, and occurs in both the 'encouraged' and 'accepted' categories.]

    We think that around 12% of submissions had at least one female author, but that is just a guess based on names; we don't ask authors to identify their gender. (And the names are only available to the editorial assistant until a verdict has been reached; we do blind review.)

    Reply
  9. Assist Prof

    I looked up the Philosophy Documentation Center and did not find complete information about all journals. For example, no acceptance rate is listed for Phil Imprint or PPR. The page for J Phil seemed not to be working.

    Reply
  10. Catherine Campbell

    Just to clarify Mark van Roojen's comment: Ethics publishes information about our review times and acceptance rates for the previous two calendar years in the October editorial every year.

    Reply
  11. Stephen Hetherington

    In 2013, Australasian Journal of Philosophy received just over 650 submissions of papers (quite apart from the book reviews and book notes). This included the revisions of previous submissions. As of mid-July 2014, we have already received 415 submissions, including revisions (and still ignoring book reviews and book notes).

    As to acceptance rates, I am slightly puzzled by the figure that appears in the link to Andrew Cullison's site. He lists AJP as having an overall acceptance rate of 15.45%. That figure must be including book reviews and book notes, all of which are invited and hence generally accepted. Once they are set aside from the reckoning, the true acceptance rate for AJP in 2013 was about 5.5%.

    Reply
  12. Thom Brooks

    I was referring instead to publications by the Philosophy Documentation Center. The first is its Directory of American Philosophers (see: http://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/item?openform&item=ad14-15) and the International Directory (see: http://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/item?openform&item=id1314). I believe the US directory also includes Canada.

    These resources should provide much of the information colleagues are calling for. I'm surprised so few have copies of it in their department — I found it essential as an editor.

    Reply

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