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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (UPDATED)

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRON FROM YESTERDAY

On FB, Alex Guerrero noted the dramatic decline in the number of reviews NDPR publishes each year in the last few years, which generated a lively discussion.  Here's what happened.  Gary and Staci Gutting worked tirelessly (and without much support or compensation) to produce the hundreds of reviews each year; subsequent editors (Jc Beall, Christopher Shields) did not receive sufficient course relief or administrative support to continue that volume of publication.  My sense is editors would need relief from at least two courses, and financial support for two administrative assistants to significantly increase the number of reviews published each year–either that or Notre Dame needs to find someone who will work for free, and at the expense of their other work, to do this!

UPDATE:  Chris Shields, the current editor, writes with some corrections regarding the current situation (which sounds improved from when Jc Beall was editor):

Many thanks for calling attention to the situation at NDPR. Your diagnosis is at least partly correct: we run on a very tight budget, and since leaving Notre Dame, where I received a one-course reduction for serving as Editor, I edit the journal uncompensated. (Notre Dame does offer material support of a reasonable sort for a Managing Editor and an Editorial Assistant.) It is also true, just as you say, that Gary and Stacie Gutting ran NDPR as a labor of love and dedicated enormous amounts of time and energy to its success. 

The issue of late, however, derives not from any lack of resources: we are ready to publish a good deal more—we are comfortably provisioned to publish +/- 120 reviews per year—but we are simply not receiving commissioned reviews. Oddly, and inexplicably, reviewers have en masse begun to ignore agreed deadlines: over the last months submissions have dwindled to a fistful per month. I am really not sure why. We currently have over 200 reviews outstanding and we are simply not receiving submissions from those who have agreed to review for us. We chase and nudge and prod—really the least edifying part of what we do—but mainly to no avail.

I wonder: are other journals or publishers experiencing similar issues?

Comments are open for answers to this last question.  Given how quickly NDPR reviews appear and how influential they can be, I'm surprised folks don't leap at the chance to review when invited.

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5 responses to “Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (UPDATED)”

  1. Reviewer

    it's possible that, given precisely how widely read and influential they can be, perhaps some individuals – at least those tenure-track – are informed by the following: the time it would take to get a NDPR review right would almost be equal to, say, getting a journal article right; but there's little upside to getting a NDPR review right (I suspect book reviews, even NDPR reviews, probably wouldn't count for 'much' in a tenure review) and a lot of downside in getting an NDPR review wrong (given that NDPR reviews are widely read). One's positive (or negative) judgment of a book, for example, might be at odds with the 'prevailing' views. A long-winded way of saying: there's not a lot of tangible 'prestige benefits' that come with NDPR reviews, and that, while some do go onto be influential, maybe the previously high standards that were set are now becoming a barrier for entry, so to speak.

    I don't know if this explains *all* the backlog, but maybe it might go someway to explaining some of the backlog.

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  2. Mohan Matthen

    When the Guttings were running NDPR, a review or sometimes two would pop into your email inbox every morning; usually, they were lively, accessible, and fun to read. What's more, most of your colleagues would have read them, so that they were often the subject of conversation. Also, virtually every book was reviewed, so that if you needed a nice summary of an argument of a book, you could rely on NDPR's search bar. So, there was a strong incentive to put some effort into NDPR reviews–if your review was fun to read, people would pay you compliments for months after. Very little of this seems to be true any longer. Like Chris Shields, I am baffled by the trendline. (Though in checking this claim, I checked a few recent reviews. One was Peter Stone's review of Christopher Zurn's Splitsville USA. Stone writes: "Zurn’s book . . . offers a more mature and sophisticated defence of the idea [of splitting up the USA] than anything (Marjorie Taylor) Greene is capable of producing." This must surely be one of the most hilarious examples of damning with faint praise that I have ever come across–and it seems intended as such. That said, Stone is somewhat tediously closed-minded about what strikes me as a fundamentally good idea.)

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  3. Matt Lister

    "I wonder: are other journals or publishers experiencing similar issues?"

    I've written quite a few book reviews (including a couple for the NDPR) and have recently had a problem of my own – the press not sending me the book. I'd recently been approached about reviewing some books (for two different journals) from OUP. One book was eventually sent to me, though it was a bit slow and I had to follow up. In the other case, I didn't get the book, followed up with the journal, the journal contacted the press again, I still didn't get it, I followed up, the press was contacted again, still no book, and I contacted the press, and still no book was sent. Eventually I decided it wasn't worth my time, for the small value I'd get for reviewing the book, to keep pushing the issue, especially given that I had a lot of other things to do. I'd not had trouble with presses sending me books that I was supposed to review in the past, so wonder if this is a contributing factor, at least in some cases.

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  4. Birchlse

    One solution might be to reset and relax the expectations from reviewers. The instruction could be: it's OK to write a short (perhaps 1000-1500 word) review if that's all you have time for, but we welcome longer reviews.

    In an age when Claude 3 can literally summarise a book in seconds if you paste in the text, the "summarising" part of the reviewer's task has become depressing and pointless, leaving only the "insightful commentary" part, which is hard work and for some books incredibly difficult.

    Another factor is probably that email reminders are no longer effective, because we're all bombarded with automated emails from editorial managers. Email has become seriously dysfunctional. To really remind someone now, you literally have to get their number and send them a WhatsApp message or similar.

    Reply
  5. Corey W. Dyck

    As the (outgoing) book review editor for Kantian Review, I can say that this trend does not extend to Kant scholarship. We have a fairly healthy backlog of reviews and while there's always some small percentage of commissions that fail to materialize, on the whole things run smoothly. But perhaps it's not so surprising in the end that Kantians would take their self-imposed obligations to produce reviews as categorically binding.

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