The Philosophy Journal Insight Project, which collects and organizes information about philosophy journals, has grown a bit since we first reported on it last year and is asking journals to submit data via a new “operations survey”.

In the following guest post, Sam Andrews, a recent philosophy PhD from the University of Birmingham who created and directs the project, discusses recent and upcoming developments at it.

This is part of a series of guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.

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Developments at the Philosophy Journal Insight Project
by Sam Andrews

Academic philosophy currently lacks any universal or standardized set of metrics on journal policies, practices, operations, or rankings. This obscurity makes it difficult for philosophical researchers to know which journals are appropriate venues for their manuscripts. The lack of clarity regarding review lengths is particularly detrimental for early career researchers who have a limited window in which to publish.

The Philosophy Journal Insight Project (PJIP) is set up to address these issues by maintaining a comprehensive database about the policies and operations of philosophy journals, surveying journals to collect novel statistics, conducting data analysis to provide insights, and disseminating those outputs to the philosophical community.

When the project was first featured on the Daily Nous, it consisted of a single spreadsheet containing information about 47 journals. Our resources have since expanded significantly in both size and scope.

PJIP Resources

The PJIP website hosts two key resources: the ‘Philosophy Journal Directory’ and the ‘Philosophy Journal Ranking Index’.

The Journal Directory is an interactive table containing a detailed overview of over 200 philosophy journals. It contains information about the journal’s specialism, word limits, review anonymity, open-access status, SJR ranking, SNIP ranking, CiteScore, types of papers published (book reviews; discussions), aims and scope, eISSN, and publisher.

Like the Directory, the Ranking Index is an interactive table, but it presents various ranking metrics for each journal. It contains the following measures: SJR, SNIP, CiteScore, Cite Percentage, H-5 (Google Scholar), H index (SJR), and survey results from Leiter and de Burin.

The aim of the Directory is to help philosophers decide what journals are suitable venues for their manuscripts while the Ranking Index intends to help philosophers determine, via their preferred metric (or a combination of metrics), the perceived reputation of any given journal.

Using the Directory & Ranking Index

Both tables are interactive and allow users to search for specific journals, show only a particular type of journal, or order them by certain metrics.

In the Directory, you’re easily able to see which philosophy journals practice triple-blind review, which publish book reviews, or which are diamond open-access.

In the Ranking Index, you can view the standings of journals when measured by their CiteScore, by what percentage of articles receive at least one publication, or by how many papers the journal publishes on average per year.

The Directory also offers users the ability to identify journals that meet highly specific criteria by using the ‘Custom Search’ function located under the table. This includes (among other things) searching and filtering for:

Journals that will consider a manuscript of a certain length.

Journals that publish in selected sub-disciplines.

Journals that have rankings (SJR, SNIP, or CiteScore) greater than x.

Journals that do not allow for open-access publication.

It is possible to make several of these searches at the same time. For example, you could specify that you only want to see journals that would consider a manuscript of 8,834 words, that publish papers in ‘General Philosophy’ OR ‘Moral and Political philosophy’ OR ‘Aesthetics’, have an SJR greater than 0.5, and will allow for open-access publication (as is shown in the picture below).

Figure 1 – Using the PJIP Directory’s ‘Custom Search’ Function

For more information on how to make these types of searches, there’s a guide here explaining most aspects of the directory.

Additionally, if you click on the journal’s name it links to a page that displays all the information contained in both the Directory and Ranking Index for that journal. For example, here’s Philosophers’ Imprint, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Analysis.

Request for Journals to participate in our Survey

Something that you’ll immediately notice is that several columns in our resources are currently empty. These columns are about journal operations (submissions, acpt. rates, review lengths, etc.). This is because there is no universal or accurate source for these metrics.

While some journals do provide this information, there is little uniformity across journals; it’s not clear what metrics you’ll find for each journal nor is it a given that the metrics will be calculated in the same way (i.e., Springer journals display median for review times, while most others tend to use mean averages).

Likewise, while there is the APA’s Journal Surveys (which is a fantastic resource), they are based on author-reported information and only reliably cover a limited number of journals (as noted in a recent PJIP report for the Blog of the APA, only 19 journals recorded more than 30 surveys in the last 5 years).

To address these issues, the PJIP is currently running a ‘Operations Survey’ that has the backing of numerous philosophical organizations including the American Philosophical Association, Blog of the APA, British Philosophical Association, Australasian Association of Philosophy​, Latin American Association for Analytic Philosophy​, PhilPapers Foundation​, Society for the Metaphysics of Science​, ​Asian Philosophical Association, Society for European Philosophy, Australasian Association for Logic, and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

The survey asks for information about journal acceptance rates, number of submissions, % of manuscripts returned to authors with comments, average time for desk rejections, average time for external reviews, R&R rates, and the number of requests to review sent (and accepted).

We are asking journals to submit their statistics for the 2023 calendar year by the 15th of September, but flexibility is possible for journals with particularly lengthy publication timeframes. Although it would be helpful if journals could answer every question, that is not required. Journals are free to skip any questions where they cannot readily provide answers. The results will be incorporated into the PJIP’s resources by the end of 2024 and the plan is to run the survey again each year.

Overall, it would be great for as many journals as possible to participate in the survey and provide answers to as many questions as possible—sharing the survey widely to raise awareness will help as will informing any journals or publishers of its existence. (Of note: around 20 journals have completed the survey so far and several more have indicated their intention to. We’re also in contact with Brill and Wiley about obtaining the information from the publisher instead of the journal).