How the prestige journal publication system is preventing us from writing our best work

There is a discussion on the Daily Nous on whether having some papers at top-5 journals or having a monograph at a prestigious publisher is the best measure of quality in a job candidate or someone who goes up for tenure or promotion.

Discussions such as these are diagnostic for our profession, which I worry is in decline (see here). Philosophy departments are downsizing or closing, and adjunctification continues apace. We're also becoming less relevant. You would not guess it from looking at a typical philosophy journal issue that we're facing existential threats such as the loss of our liberties (in protesting, gender expression, reproductive healthcare), climate change (at the time of writing, wildfires rage in Texas), AI and the future of work, and political polarization.

Instead of trying to be relevant more broadly speaking we put a lot of effort in disciplinary relevance, that is, placing our work in the most prestigious venues, writing on topics that will land our work in those journals. And we have discussions on the minutiae of what the definite markers of prestige are. In this, we are even worse than that cartoonish image of the medieval schoolmen who discussed how many angels fit on the head of a pin. At least they were talking about angels. We are talking about nothing—chasing emptiness: vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas, as that perceptive writer of Ecclesiastes put it.

These enduring discussions about prestige betray a scarcity mindset. With so few jobs, we need increasingly obscure and irrelevant measures to differentiate between so many fine candidates. Academic philosophy as a profession is collapsing, and we've also exhausted the pep talk on alt-ac (I still think it is important to direct candidates to these opportunities and train people broadly, but alt-ac cannot solve our problems, I'll save more thought about that for another time).

As Eric Steinhart writes in a comment (excerpted here) on Daily Nous:

Are we asking about whether the journal system is fundamentally flawed? Nope. Are we asking whether absurdly low acceptance rates indicate that the system is merely a lottery? Or an ELO system gamed to produce longer peacock tails? Nope and nope. Or whether the reviewer crisis or the shift to pay-to-play open access is going to destroy the whole system? Nope.

Or whether book publishing is also fundamentally flawed? Or why philosophy books have settled into a deep attractor basin of monotonous style? We could, after all, be using digital technologies to produce some fantastic books, real works of art, but nah, let’s just stick to single-column 12 point font, no illustrations please.

Many junior scholars cannot afford to go on a limb and publish (as I did recently) a book with philosophical illustrations. Instead, to earn your chops in the professions you need to write about topics in such a style and way that they're plausible fits for these “general” venues. Some people write great work that fits well at these places, but most people do not. They have to shift their priorities to make it work, and even then it often doesn't.

Publishing in top-5 journals, even if we set aside the problem of luck in refereeing, inclines people toward conservatism and safety. This is not because the editors or reviewers are not open to new ideas or new styles. They might very well do, and they probably are also bored out of their mind reading the nth epicycle. No, the problem in my experience as editor and referee for many journals is that behind the veil of anonymity reviewers need to rely on certain cues to try to determine if they are in good hands with the author. After all, philosophy is much more subjective than say, cognitive psychology, where you can make comparisons with other already published work to get a sense of whether the experimental design is robust and appropriate for the theoretical question the experiment aims to answer.

For reviewing philosophy, we have to find out if the author knows what they're talking about. The cues reviewers rely on will be subtle and influenced by, among others, whether the author is a native speaker, or whether the paper is embedded in a clear disciplinary context and debate. A paper that goes out on a limb and takes risks is much more likely to get (desk)rejected because some of these cues are lacking. This might cohere with your experience too: a risky paper typically has to go through more rejections, even if it makes a bigger impact once it does get published.

Of course, this doesn't mean that top journals never publish a groundbreaking paper, let alone a fun, whimsical paper. It does sometimes happen, but when it does, it's almost by accident. Maybe the reviewer happened to be the right one for the paper, and was just thinking of this problem and this allows them to see the potential of the paper in a way another reviewer (who is overburdened, not really a specialist on the topic, maybe hasn't written about this stuff for years but is still asked to review about it) doesn't. I try to counteract this tendency toward conservatism when I notice it in myself (e.g., giving papers with a more ambitious thesis the benefit of the doubt), but I also doubt it's possible to entirely rid yourself of biases in this way.

Relatedly, I think this is why monographs often dare to go further, or why you can often find a cool idea buried in a paper in an edited volume. For the monograph, the anonymity is lifted and so we can use other cues—which are not unproblematic either—such as whether the author has an established track record. I often am asked to referee monographs where I am at least somewhat familiar with the author's previous works and have the sense that they know what they're doing. So I already begin with an attitude of trust, which is very different from the hermeneutic of suspicion that results in the fatal normalcy bias that pervades journal publication. The book still has to deliver, of course.

I've found lately that I do my best work whenever I write what I care about, or in co-authored work, what my co-author(s) and I care about. The best writing happens when I try not to think about what others care about, especially not referees. Referee-proofing is the death of a paper. Rather, I have come to think of good writing as an egocentric, or paradoxically, an entirely selfless practice. You need to care about the ideas foremost. If you don't care, how do you get others to care about them? You need to push aside thoughts of how others think of you, whether they will think it is any good. You simply have to try the best you can for the sake of the work, and for the sake of the ideas you want to express, and express them in the best way you can.

Intrusive thoughts about how the paper makes you look or how it will impact your candidate quality are detrimental to good writing. This is why I think writing papers that aim to placate reviewers in top journals hinders us to do our very best work.

Some people's writing naturally fits such venues. They tend to be people with long CVs strung together with papers in Nous, PPR etc. They tend to do very well in our profession. Their work may be, often is, excellent.

But there has to be room for more. This cannot be the only kind of philosophy that allows people to disciplinarily flourish (that and some weirdos who managed to carve a niche outside of that, like me. I don't have a single paper in a top-5 journal). Philosophy is hugely relevant to so many existential problems that face us today. Our writing should reflect it. When we can write what we care about, our writing will become more relevant to others too.