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

Best “general” philosophy journals, 2022

Brian Leiter

So with not quite 1,000 participants, and nearly 90,000 votes on comparisons cast, here are the top 25 (the score in parentheses reflects the odds of the journal prevailing in a comparison):

1.  Philosophical Review (89)

2.  Nous (87)

3.  Philosophy & Phenomenological Research (86)

4.  Mind (85)

5.  Journal of Philosophy (84)

6.  Australasian Journal of Philosophy (75)

7.  Philosophical Studies (74)

8.  Philosopher's Imprint (73)

9.  Philosophical Quarterly (69)

10. Analysis (65)

11. Synthese (62)

12. Canadian Journal of Philosophy (54)

12. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (54)

14. Ergo (51)

14. Erkenntnis (51)

16. European Journal of Philosophy (49)

16. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (49)

18. American Philosophical Quarterly (48)

19. Journal of the American Philosophical Association (46)

20. Inquiry (40)

21. Philosophical Perspectives (39)

22. The Monist (37)

23. Thought (36)

24. Philosophical Issues (33)

25. Philosophical Topics (30)

25. Ratio (30)

One error of omission was Analytic Philosophy, which might well have made the top 25 (as it did in 2018).  You can see the 2018 results here.  Online surveys probably have a slight bias in favor of online journals, like Philosopher's Imprint and, more recently, Ergo, although the former has been clearly among the top ten for quite some time now, and justfiably so it seems to me. Constructive comments/observations about the results are welcome.

 

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27 responses to “Best “general” philosophy journals, 2022”

  1. A philosopher in the UK

    I find it interesting, but not suprising, that people tend to think that there are FIVE top journals (instead of the usual big four narrative), and that Nous and PPR rank so high. My prediction is that Nous is going to be the premiere philosophy journal in a few years time, and that J Phil is likely to continue lose prestige (prediction about Nous is based on my personal taste: it publishes, in my opnion, the most exciting stuff in core analytics. Prediction about J Phil is due to the fact that many people, myself included,think of it as a badly run, and quite idiosyncratic, journal).

    I am also not surprised to see AJP doing so well: a truly well-run journal.

    Reply
  2. PI

    I see it spelled incorrectly just as often as I see it spelled correctly, but the journal is called Philosophers' Imprint and not Philosopher's Imprint. Perhaps this should serve as a warning for future journal creators.

    Reply
  3. UK opinion haver

    Journal of Philosophy is managed by PDC, which for many academics makes their papers hard to access. Prestige is sticky, but inaccessibility should be a death knell for a journal. No surprise then that open access journals are climbing the ranks.

    Reply
  4. Was an undergrad in China

    I have to say I totally agree with you! PDC does very awful job in their accessibility, and it get worse if you're from non-Western, non-Anglophone countries: although many institutions would subscribe to large publishers such as Springer and Wiley, they usually won't subscribe to PDC. When I did my undergrad in China, I usually had to rely upon other resources to download papers from the Journal of Philosophy, especially the latest ones (those not on JSTOR).

    Reply
  5. Ergo seems well deserved

    as it is really well run. I also think it publishes interesting stuff.

    Reply
  6. Ted Parent

    It's amazing to me that Phil Perspectives is not among the "top 20." (Note: I have never published in Phil Perspectives.) I'm not saying that Phil Persp should be ranked over other journals in the top 20… My point is rather that the distinctions between 16-25 seem to me quite subtle, at least in terms of prestigue.

    Reply
  7. PG

    Is the Monist accessible online? If not, how do people read / get to know about the papers in there?

    Reply
  8. European philosopher

    I know that this has been discussed before, but I would not count Sythese as a "general journal". There is almost no value theory in there and it explicitly says that only very specific parts of ethics is published in this journal. I would say: if Synthese is a general journal, then Ethics should also be a general journal – and then we would end up with a top 6 and not a top 5.

    Reply
  9. Interested party

    I'd love to see a ranking of *all* philosophy journals – general and specialist journals together. Perhaps this could be made possible by making pairwise comparisons between (a) specialist journals within the same field, (b) general journals, and (c) specialist journals and general journals (given that the general journal publishes in that specific subfield).

    Some subfields have more prestigious specialist journals than others, so it'd be interesting to see, say, how publications in Ethics compare against publications in the Journal of the History of Philosophy. It'd also be interesting to get more of an idea of how the top specialist journals compare against the top general journals.

    Reply
  10. Andy

    I have personally published two papers within value theory in Synthese, and another that very much borders on value theory. Plus they publish a lot of epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. That alone should be enough for them to count as a generalist journal – far more so than Ethics.

    A more general comment: I wonder whether everyone has in mind the same thing by 'best' when ranking journals. I was thinking of this along the lines of 'how happy would I be to land a paper in this journal' or 'how high are my expectations if I pick and read a random article from this journal'. But it seems like some others have ranked instead in terms of general importance to the discipline, or how well run/accessible they are etc. I think that these are all valid ways to rank journals, but we get very different results from such rankings.

    Reply
  11. Philosopher

    Why not do this as a PGR-style survey? That way specialist journals could also get ranked and it’d be a tad more ‘scientific’ (or at least less anonymous).

    BL: I don't have the time, but others are welcome to try.

    Reply
  12. historian of philosophy

    Maybe hardly any of these journals are generalist journals, since most of them publish virtually no history of philosophy. The main exceptions are PAS, PPQ and EJP.

    BL: I see I wasn't clear about what I meant by "generalist": I meant a journal that publishes in multiple areas of philosophy, but not necessarily ALL areas. Other journals in the top 25 also publish in history of philosophy beyond the ones you note: Philosophers' Imprint, Inquiry, Monist, Canadian J.Phil., JAPA, Phil Review, among others.

    Reply
  13. assistant prof

    Is there a link to the whole list (past 25, that is)?

    BL: You may be able to get to it via the original poll link. But I would put even less credence in the results outside the top 25, since I'm sure there were other errors of omission.

    Reply
  14. Skeptical

    The problem with these polls is that people have a perverse incentive to vote for the journals they publish in. So, less selective journals will have their ranking in the poll inflated. I think that’s the only way to explain how Philosophical Studies is so high up in the final results.

    Reply
  15. JDRox

    I think Phil Studies ranking seems "about right", or at least understandable/defensible. I mean, I think they publish a lot of bad work, but they publish a lot of good work too, since they publish a lot. So a fair number of the good papers one reads will have been published in Phil Studies. With that being said, I guess I agree that they're ranked too highly by the "how high are my expectations if I pick and read a random article from this journal?" standard.

    Reply
  16. doris

    Phil Studies fares pretty well on the bibliometrics, so I doubt self-interested voting "is the only way to explain" the Journal's enviable ranking.

    According to Resurchify:

    PS: IF 1.92; h-index 75

    Nous: IF 3.90; h-index 73

    PR: IF 5.0; h-index 60

    One can argue about the value of the bibliometrics, though I'm guessing they compare favorably to "stuff I was told in grad school."

    PS does publish a lot of papers — eg. a lot more than PR;m this does increase the chances that voters have published there, but it probably also increases the chances that voters have read something they like there.

    Reply
  17. Brian Leiter

    While I agree that Phil Studies should be in the top 10, and am puzzled by the skepticism expressed by others, I believe that the H-index is also affected by the volume of publications, so it would need to be adjusted for that for comparison purposes. The impact factor is probably a better metric.

    Reply
  18. John Tilley

    For what it's worth, I believe that Philosophical Quarterly (in which I have never published, by the way) is just as good as the three journals ranked directly above it.

    Reply
  19. Brian Leiter

    Just to be clear, I think it would be a grave error to treat ordinal differences of a few places as remotely meaningful.

    Reply
  20. Ted

    I perfer the old method than the new pairwise comparison method. In the new survey, a person can cast as many votes as possible (in that case, the journals that she likes may be overrated or the journals that she dislikes may be underrated) or as few votes as possible (in that case, her votes don't reflect her overall ranking of the journals).

    Perhaps Brain can run another survey that uses the old method.

    Reply
  21. doris

    Agreed that the h-index is sensitive to volume of publication.

    Here's Hirsch himself:

    "I propose the index h, defined as the number of papers with citation number ≥h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher." (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0507655102)

    Most obviously, the h-index cannot be higher than the total number of papers.

    So Gettier, who has one highly cited, germinal, paper, but only 3 (correct me if I'm wrong) papers total, should have an h-index of 3 or less.

    Leaving aside the individual case, what would we think of a journal following that model — say, that published one highly cited paper a year?

    Placing in that journal could be highly prestigious, I imagine, but I can also imagine that a journal following a more conventional model, and enjoying a high h-index, would be more important in the advancement of its field.

    Suggestion: it's not unreasonably supposed that volume of publication is a factor in journal quality, and it is not unreasonable for the h-index to register that. (Of course, it also registers quality, with the coarse metric of citation.)

    I'm not out to defend the h-index (which was not designed for the present purpose), but it does give an indication that the reputation of PS, as reflected in your poll, reflects a reasonable assessment of its quality.

    Reply
  22. M

    "Online surveys probably have a slight bias in favor of online journals…"

    I don't understand why one should think this. Is the thought that a significant number of philosophers who don't keep up with the blogs still mainly read physical journal copies? Or that people online like purely online things? Neither idea sounds plausible to me, but I haven't thought of others.

    For what it's worth, in my own view both Phil Imprint and Ergo are underrated here (but I also have published in each, so may well be biased for the more understandable reason mentioned above by Skepticism.).

    Reply
  23. APC

    I realize this is not one of the most pressing issues facing our profession, but it’s disheartening that two of what are considered the best journals in the field have such horrible typesetting. It’d be one thing if an open access, largely volunteer run journal looked like it was designed by amateurs; it’s another for a giant like Wiley to produce such low quality stuff. Shame on them, especially when open access, largely volunteer run journals like Ergo, Phil Imprint, JESP, and the adjacent Semantics and Pragmatics, have much better typesetting than any of the Wiley journals.

    Reply
  24. anonymous assistant professor

    @Ted Parent, I assume it is because Phil Perspectives is not peer reviewed (most–maybe all?–of the papers are invited–I believe that is also true of Phil Issues and Phil Topics, though I am less familiar with the practices of those). In terms of journals I end up reading a lot of papers from, it is very far up there (and I suspect is for a lot of people, especially in M&E, though maybe this is wrong). But it seems like (likely for good reason, I don't have strong views one way or the other here) anonymous peer review is treated as an important feature of whatever the "bestness" criteria people use in filling out these polls. It's probably also related to papers published in invited places "counting" for less on CVs/in promotion in most people's eyes.

    Reply
  25. Philosopher from Taiwan

    My institution refers to the journal ranking by Scopus for all subject areas. I'm not familiar with its ranking methodology. The ranking of philosophical journals leans heavily towards interdisciplinary areas and applied philosophy. But the ranking of general philosophy journals is pretty close to this one.

    Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri ("enter subject area": philosophy)

    Reply
  26. Dustin Locke

    Hi Brian! As you know, these survey-based rankings tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies, regardless of their initial accuracy. I'm not someone who thinks this is necessarily a bad thing. But I do think that the self-fulfilling nature of these rankings makes it particularly unfortunate that Analytic Philosophy was omitted from the survey. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that their non-appearance on this list could affect the submissions they receive in the future. Too late to fix this now, but what about moving your comment noting the omission to a more prominent location in the post–say, right above the list–in the hopes that more people will see it? Anyway, I don't have any personal dogs in this fight, but I was just sitting here feeling pretty bad for folks connected to Analytic Philosophy!

    Reply
  27. dcw

    I'd be interested to see some polls by area that included generalist journals and specialist journals for that area. This would be instructive for both early career researchers and search committee members. After all, the top generalist journal overall does not necessarily publish good work in some particular sub-field of philosophy. (I often see a variant of this complaint made with respect to philosophy of cognitive science, for instance.)

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