Journal Prestige Advice for Graduate Students

I don't have time to blog much nowadays, but I want to keep this place active. One recurring use for the site is to outline to things that I find myself having to repeat; better to just have a place I can link people back. So I am going to do that here with a common piece of careerist publication advice I give junior scholars in philosophy. 

I often have graduate students ask me how publishing in such and such a journal will be perceived by others in the field. This is a somewhat complicated question for me as I am on-the-record sceptic about journals being good quality guides. So I always have to caveat a bit by at least telling people to go read my paper on this if they are interested. (Though of course I sometimes have to caveat a bit in the other direction - despite what I think of the current system, if someone under the present culture and incentive structure does not try to get their paper published through peer review that can be a negative quality signal too. These things are subtle.) But I try to give good faith career advice here despite my misgivings.

After all, the young scholars who ask me about this are interested in how others will perceive them, not my idiosyncratic views. And they have good reason to care about that! Academia works on a reputational system, and the fact is that people will infer things about your quality as a researcher from the venues that you publish in. This even creates something of a self-fulfilling property as people will tend to guestimate how good their work is and send what they self-conceive to be their best work to the perceived-to-be best journals. Likewise, sometimes reviewers internalise these notions and hold pieces to higher standards at fancier journals. 

(For my brief thoughts on that habit by reviewers, using a distinction I made a muchness of here: I think that is absurdly bad practice on reviewers' part when they hold articles in less prestigious journals to lower standards of plausibility, but perhaps makes sense internal to the journal system if it is done in terms of "interestingness", though I would still disagree.) 

As such, even though I personally think pre-publication peer review is a very bad system for picking out high quality work, grad students and junior scholars still have a defensible interest in trying to work out what other people will take to be the markers of high quality work in their field. Here's what I tend to tell people about that.

Journals can be basically classed into four bands. Extremely high prestige, good-but-not-top, reputationally neutral, and actively-counts-against-you. The extremely high prestige journals will be the places that people in your field take to be so good that even just one publication there can make a huge difference to your chances on the job market or for tenure etc. The good but not top do not quite have that effect but if you have multiple pieces in such journals it is a very good sign indeed. Reputationally neutral do not really count for or against you, though I should say it will generally be seen as a bad sign if you only ever publish in such places (or even if too high a proportion of your pieces are in such places). Then the actively-count-against-you journals are typically the scammish pay-to-publish journals.

(I also tend to think that it can make a difference to publish "up" a band in a way that keeping publishing in the same band does not - after you have gone from 0 to 1 publications, the nth+1 publication in the same band rarely makes that much of a difference to how people perceive you so long as your general rate of publication in the years since your PhD is seen as tolerably productive, usually meaning one or two respectable publications per year. But even if you have published a fair bit, it can still be quite a big difference maker if you go from having no publications in the top band to having at least one.)

Different fields will organise these differently, but to make things concrete I can say a bit about philosophy. In general analytic philosophy world the Extremely High Prestige journals are usually agreed to be: Noûs, Mind, Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. There are lots of good-but-not-top journals, so just to name a few; Ergo, Erkenntnis, Philosophical Studies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, etc. Reputationally neutral journals starts getting into the me feeling a bit impolite to write them out (ask me over a pint!) but I can at least say that typically (not always but typically) edited book essay collections put out by university presses are here. And the scam journals I don't remember the names of because it's so rare that I see anyone make the mistake of actually publishing in them that I am not sure how their business model works to be honest.

Some further notes about this little division:

1. Obviously any system of broad social categories like this will in fact admit of edge cases and no neat boundaries etc. It's boring and obvious that this is true, and well done on your humanities PhD if you immediately started furiously typing out a comment to this effect. But be that as it may, as a rough and ready guide to grad students - try and identify which band your publication is in, and stick to the top two as far as you can until you are established; at which point the reputationally neutral ones should be considered more often. Never pay the scam journals. 

2. People will claim to be able to make more fine grained distinctions within these bands. This is, to my mind, largely fake - I can't at this point fully separate out my scepticism of the system as a whole from the advice I am willing to give. But more than just my own personal scepticism, from talking to people I have found that it is largely pure superstition; down the years I have on many occasions had philosophers of science very confidently tell me all about the ideological and methodological and stylistic differences between what's wanted at Philosophy of Science versus British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. But really its a small field whose editors are all friends with each other drawing from the exact same reviewer pool; it's pure pigeons bobbing to make the food dispenser open stuff when people try and infer what little difference made one of those journals reject their paper when the other accepted it. What's more, even where its not superstition, there's enough idiosyncrasy in tastes that outside of the big picture categories you will find that one committee members sense of the fine-grained order is very different from another's, so it evens out in the main and over the long run.

3. Talking of Philosophy of Science and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science one genuine nuance here comes from the status of the Top (Sub)Speciality Journals. I am genuinely not sure if philosophy is a bit idiosyncratic here, but we tend to have a division between "generalist journals" and "(sub)speciality journals", wherein sometimes publishing in the Top (Sub)Speciality Journal can count as highly as one of the Extremely High Prestige journals, and its almost always at least as good as the band two good-but-not-top journals. And my sense is basically which it falls into just tracks the standing of the speciality. 

In fact this is a point where, again, I feel like too much precision is just a bit fake. I feel confident that Philosophy of Science and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science are thought of very highly. They probably count about equivalent in reputational standing to a top band journal, like Mind or some such. You then get subdisciplines within philosophy of science which again have their own prestige hierarchies; I am sort of aware that Biology and Philosophy is considered a good place for philosophers of biology, but since you can get phil-bio published in Philosophy of Science and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science I sort of assume that stands to them something like how Ergo stands to Mind. So I guess that makes me think of that as a good-but-not-top place; but I would probably defer to any philosopher of biology who told me that actually such and such a paper could really only go in Biology and Philosophy rather than the more general philosophy of science journals, and so under those circumstances I might treat it as a top-band publication. And then there are specialist-journals where I am not sure how to classify their relationship to other speciality journals. E.g. I know that Law and Philosophy is a top place for philosophy of law, so I would tend to think of that as a top speciality journal for its field -- but could some of what goes there have been published in Ethics or Political Philosophy? How about British Journal of Aesthetics? At some point people claiming to be able to make fine grained quality judgements here are lying to you.

4. This relates, but only imperfectly, to quant-measures like that of h-index. I am very much not someone who thinks such measures tell us nothing. They tell us something indeed! But the huge confounding factor is that different subfields have different citation norms, and some journals are more likely to interact with people from multiple fields. For instance, here's google metrics' sense of the top philosophy journals with their h-index listed by the underlined number:

  

I think anyone familiar with the field would say that while they are all respectable places to publish - this is definitely not a straightforward map of our internal prestige hierarchy. (Though even then, Philosophy Compass, while certainly reputable, has a somewhat strange status, since it's sort-of invite only.) What's more, the journal Nursing Ethics (for instance) has h-index of 57, which would apparently make it our second most prestigious journal if it was to be counted in here. This can be actively and extremely misleading for someone looking to work out where's prestigious to place their work in philosophy. Those quant measures aren't nothing, but you are better off asking a well-disposed insider to give you a sense in terms of the four bands I mentioned above than you are relying on just such measures.

5. Rare but interesting special cases can perhaps put journals in the reputationally harmful category even if they are not scams. As far as I can tell this happens when people take publication in the journal to signal something about you independently of the journal quality. For instance, until recently in the broad area of analytic ethics and political philosophy I think there was a fairly well agreed upon sense that the top three journals were Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, and Philosophy & Public Affairs. However, there was then something of a scandal wherein the publishing companies overrode editorial independence in the latter two journals, and so they both ended up with successor journals run by the academic editorial teams behind those journals titled Political Philosophy and Free & Equal respectively. I have since heard that at least some people, fairly or not (I haven't much looked into it so genuinely cannot say), will now take publication in Philosophy & Public Affairs, which still exists under-the-control-of-the-original-publishers, to be a signal that you are ok with private interference in matters of academic freedom and so will count it against you somewhat. For more culture war spicy cases I think there was a time when Hypatia basically fell apart due to editorial infighting and so lost its place as the leading journal for feminist philosophy and became actively-a-bad-sign to some people (my sense is Hypatia has fully lost that stigma now, but I am not sure it ever regained its old status), and fights are ongoing about how legit The Journal of Controversial Ideas actually is.

I think situations like this are exceedingly rare and probably not worth worrying too much about. But they can happen, so I mention them here for completeness sake.

In any case, here is my blog post of some standard things. I might add or delete things from this as more noteworthy things strike me. If nothing else: if you are worried about the standing of the place you are publishing in, have the four band system in mind and ask a well-meaning insider you trust which band the venue you are considering would fall in. Aim for the top two, but don't panic if you end up in the third it's not bad so long as its not everything. Top (sub)speciality journals are a bit of an exception to this, but they are generally safe to land in so if you publish therein you can be fairly confident that it will be well thought of so long as people have any respect for your subfield. And if they don't it's not the venue of publication that will be holding you back anyway!