In What Kind of Publications are the Articles You’re Most Proud Of?
A self-described “reasonably well-published associate professor” shared the following observation about his own writing:
The other day I picked out 7 articles that I am most proud of. Only one of them was published in a journal. Two were chapters from my books, and the other four were all invited contributions to edited volumes.
Shay Alkalay, Stacks of Drawers
He wondered whether non-journal pieces also dominated others’ lists of their own favorite writing.
So I’ll put the question to you: in what kinds of publications are the articles (or article-length writings) you’re most proud of published? Peer-reviewed journals? Invited edited volumes? Chapters in your own books? A website? Elsewhere? Nowhere?
I would think that the answers to this question may vary with time in the profession (people who are more junior tend to be focused on getting peer-reviewed publications for the job market, annual reviews, and tenure, while people who have been around longer tend to get more invitations to contribute to edited volumes).
So when you share your answers, please tell us how far along you are in the profession.
Also welcome are reflections on what we might learn from these answers. If it turns out that many people, like my correspondent, are most happy with the writing of theirs that has appeared outside of peer-reviewed journals, what, if anything, does that tell us?
I am most proud of my book chapters. I haven’t submitted articles to philosophy journals in a decade, unless I am specifically invited to do so.
Getting published in a top 5 journal is where it’s at. Everyone knows that these journals are the gold standard in terms of job market currency. The papers I’ve successfully placed in these journals are the ones I’m most proud of—they require not only immense effort and time but also a bit of luck, much like winning a sports championship. Sure, I’ve written more self-indulgent pieces for edited volumes, and while some of the philosophical views explored there are interesting (at least to me), let’s be honest: an acceptance from Nous or another absolutely top-tier journal is what really counts at the end of the day.
I agree. top 5 publications (or we can go to some extent top 10 and include things like Phil Studies, Phil Quarterly, Phil Imprint, AJP, Analysis, increasingly Ergo) are evidence that you can do the thing that your career depends on and which we all know is hard to do (roughly 95 percent rejection rate average in these places). Unless you are Timothy Williamson or someone on that level, no one is going to read your paper in an edited volume and when you apply for jobs with edited volume papers, everyone knows the standards are much lower as these are invited pieces.
These answers suggest that you don’t really care what your paper says or how well you’ve argued for it, the only thing that matters is the gold star and the credential.
Well, that’s a very unchaitable reading…
That’s not how I read it. Top 5 publications, these comments suggest, are a proxy for the sort of work that one is likely to be most proud of because getting one requires time, effort, dedication, grit, and scarce abilities.
Exactly
Plotinus’s Goat was also very explicit about *why* they are proud of their papers in top 5 ranked journals:
“they require not only immense effort and time but also a bit of luck, much like winning a sports championship.”
Unforunately, some people just hear ‘rankings’ and see red.
Imagine asking an an athlete what sporting performance they are most proud of and they reply “placing top-3 in the olympics–because of the effort and the luck”. Then someone chimes in “the only thing that matters [to you] is the gold star and the credential.” :-/
Breaking news: Michael Phelps doesn’t care much for swimming; he’s just doing it for the medals; Simone Biles hates gymnastics; she’s in it for the gold.
many elite athletes do actually come to hate it–or at least have an extremely emotionally complex relationship to it–because they’ve been trained to focus on doing whatever it takes to win gold rather than enjoying the sport for its own sake…
Of course. The point is simply that you shouldn’t infer from the fact that they do it for glory that they (i) don’t do it for other reasons too; and so (ii) don’t enjoy it for its own sake too.
Exactly. The point is people are making fallacious inferences, which as philosophers you shouldn’t be proud of making.
Breaking news: problem of induction solved.
This made me laugh, but I do think you guys are reading Atherton as uncharitably as she’s reading you. She said “suggests”, not “entails”. And I think it’s reasonable to point out that obsession with top-5 publications may be suggestive of screwed-up priorities, just as obsession with gold medals may be suggestive of screwed-up priorities. Plotinus’s Goat said that publishing in a top-5 journal “is what really counts at the end of the day.” That, to me, does indeed *suggest* (though I of course wouldn’t say it grounds a strong inference) that PG may have conflated a proxy for value with value itself.
Fair enough!
People were very fortunate not to need to have such priorities when they were on the market decades ago. Good ole times when you could afford to do it just for its own sake.
I don’t know when these ‘good ole times’ were, but they certainly preceded my period as a member the philosophical precariat (1985-1988). ‘Publish or perish’ has been a thing for a very long time. The issue is whether publications in the top ten journals are the only things that really count, both in terms of intellectual merit and when it comes to getting a job. I think that there are other routes both to intellectual excellence and to careerist success.
That’s not the impression one gets from interviews of philosophers of your generation and from the data. But I just looked at your CV and you had zero refereed articles by the time you finished your PhD, and just one by the time you secured your first permanent position. I don’t know if you’ve spent time perusing the CVs of recent job candidates, but the situation strikes me as noticeably different.
If you’re untenured and want to secure your place in the academy, then those things certainly DO matter. Presumably you’re not saying they shouldn’t. Besides, as PG said, getting published in a top 5 philosophy journal requires immense effort and time. It also requires a lot of brains. The papers in those journals are normally well-argued.
Are all edited volumes invite only? Arent there open edited volumes?
If that’s true, then you’re not doing philosophy. You’re just pursuing your career as a Machiavellian mercenary. And what you’re interested in certainly isn’t truth. You’re only interested in worldly success. You should get out of philosophy and go into business.
Charles didn’t say top 5 publications were the only thing he is proud of, much less the only thing he cares about. One can be motivated by truth while also caring about one’s career, and it’s a bit harsh to respond like that to someone who does. It’s also disingenuous for philosophers to pretend they care not one bit about such things.
Then it just seems like an irrelevant contribution that doesn’t understand (or shifts) the QUD. Obviously, the OG contribution’s motivating thought is that it’s surprising that they are more proud of book chapter publications although journal publications (including top 5/10 publications) are more important for someone’s career and are supposed to be proxies for quality, raising the question of whether they maybe aren’t and shouldn’t be more important for someone’s career. It’s just weird to respond by noting that they’re more important for someone’s career or used as proxy for that.
I think they were simply responding to the question: what works of yours are you most proud of? Top 5 publications. People are reading too much into this.
Imagine saying this to someone face-to-face…
You have no idea what kind of colleague of teacher or mentor this person is, but you want them to GTFO the profession just because they are proud of publishing in the top venues? Or did you forget these things also matter wheI it comes to being a professional academic?
There is an outrageous amount of sanctimony and snap-judgments being made in this thread.
‘Unless you are Timothy Williamson or someone on that level, no one is going to read your paper in an edited volume and when you apply for jobs with edited volume papers, everyone knows the standards are much lower as these are invited pieces’
Two points
1) It is just not true that papers in edited volumes are less likely to be read than papers in top ten journals. Chapters in landmark ‘companions’ and ‘handbooks’ can get you a lot of airplay as I can testify from personal experience. I am, alas, a lot less famous than Timothy Williamson, but my second most cited paper (for many years my first) is a chapter in Singer’s Companion to Ethics, clocking in currently with 292 citations. Apart from this I’ve got book chapters with 92, 51, 40, 25, 32, 21, 18 and 22 citations. I don’t know what the average citation-rate is for top-journal papers but I suspect that it is less than 20. Only one of my ‘top-journal’ papers, has a higher citation-rate than my second-most cited book chapter, and none has a higher rate than my first. And it’s not just me. I published two papers by Gillian Russell in the edited collection Hume on Is and Ought (2010). According Google Scholar – net undercounter in my experience – her two papers in that book have 59 and 36 citations respectively.
Furthermore, if you want your stuff be read and cited, publications in the top ten or top five generalist journals – ‘things like Phil Studies, Phil Quarterly, Phil Imprint, AJP, Analysis [and] increasingly Ergo’ – are not always the best bet. My most cited journal article (398 citations) is in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences and the second most cited (190 citations) is in Episteme. By contrast my most cited ‘top-ten’ publication – it’s in the AJP –clocks in at a mere 159 citations. (My other three AJP publications have only 109 citations between the three of them.and my PQ papers have 79 and 48 citations each). Surprisingly an article in the popular Philosophy Now now has a total of 27 academic citations.
2) Are the standards ‘much lower’ (and known to be ‘much lower’) in edited volumes? I am with Mark Alfano on this one: ‘The top journals do tend to be pretty conservative [news to me but confirmed by other sources], which means that almost everything in them is very good but little is groundbreaking. With edited volumes and the like, there is higher variance: the best stuff is better, and the worst stuff is more prevalent’ Since this is not only true but also (apparently) widely known, a candidate with a swag of edited volume papers will not necessarily be at a disadvantage on the job-market when compared with their top-journal rival, especially as getting all those invitations in the first place is an index of a high reputation. If I read a short-listed candidate’s top-ten publications and they turned out to be as boring as many top-ten publications tend to be nowadays, then this might conceivably count against them.
Moral: Like many another I am somewhat repelled by ‘Charles’s’ and ‘Plotinus Goat’s’ unlovely combination of careerism and intellectual snobbery (and a form of intellectual snobbery too, which I suspect is characteristic only of a fairly narrow social set) . But even from a careerist point of view, I think that they are simply wrong about ‘what really counts at the end of the day.’.
This is not to say of course that it isn’t a good idea to publish (or attempt to publish) in the top ten generalist journals. After all, I have done this myself and with some success. But these are a set of small and exclusive baskets into which you don’t have to put all your eggs.
I hope that this isn’t true (for the sake of the field), but it suggests a possible explanation for why citation rates are so bad in philosophy as opposed to other fields in the humanities. I certainly read papers in my aoe (ancient philosophy) from edited volumes (as opposed to just OSAP, Phronesis, etc.). My understanding of ancient philosophy would be far poorer if I didn’t.
“Getting published in a top 5 journal is where it’s at. Everyone knows that these journals are the gold standard in terms of job market currency.”
Through these two sentences, I was convinced that this comment was intentional irony.
I did a tweet once that was 🔥
Before the dark times.
Before Elon.
Plus you already have 34 likes for the above post. So that’s something to be proud of, too!
37, Jason. 37.
Hard question as I tend to like all of my articles…or else why write them? (I’m a full professor.)
Similar to David LS above, I also don’t submit articles to journals or book projects unless specifically invited to do so. But when I do, I usually really like those articles.
If I had to pick, I suppose I’m most proud of my articles that get widely read, which perhaps maximizes the odds that it’ll have a real-world impact and move the needle at least a bit. That implies non-academic publications, such as media writing and public reports.
For instance, my last media article (on the ethics of AI kitchens and robot cooks) ended up being reprinted by Smithsonian Magazine, Discover, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other leading publications. It was originally published under a Creative Commons license, which I’d recommend for increasing the reach of your public writing.
And our public reports tend to be highly interdisciplinary, long, and even experimental, which doesn’t lend itself to finding an easy home in a journal, book, or other academic products. For instance, here’s our last report on how to imagine novel scenarios in outer space security (and these scenarios may have ethical, legal, and policy implications).
Speaking of experimental, the traditional article/paper probably shouldn’t be the only unit of measurement here. Here’s an animated short (on autonomous-vehicle dilemmas) I wrote for TED-Ed that has 2M views so far. I can imagine being proud of creating a viral social-media post, including memes, that get folks to think and even to act.
It’s also reasonable to be proud of a “sleeping beauty” paper that you might hope someday will get attention, or even if it never gets more than 10 readers—there’s value in craftsmanship, ingenuity, etc. even if no one else exists in the world. That is, external impact also isn’t the only measure here. All I’m saying is that impact is important to me, as a practical-minded academic, and you should do you…
In the last 15 years, the two articles I am most proud of appeared in the journal The Good Society (in 2016) and the New School Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (in 2019)
I was thinking about the same topic very recently and talked about it to my faculty mentor, probably one of the most productive people in philosophy, who shared a similar sentiment. I am a junior person with a pretty good publication record (it feels obnoxious to say that—sorry!), including various top 5 / top 10 journal publications. Yet, when I write chapters for book volumes, I often end up finding these papers more interesting, insightful, original, novel, … better. The obvious explanation seems to be that you have more freedom to write risky papers that make argumentative moves that are more controversial and won’t be subject to all the hedging, clarifying, and conservativism we employ to protect ourselves before the review process starts or to satisfy a reviewer in the course of an R&R, all of which often allows us to only make very narrow moves and points in journal articles. Of course, this isn’t always the case, but a tendency (which has been pointed out often in philosophy meta-discourse).
As not-even-a-junior person who have been trying to get papers published in top journals, I think I can see why some more senior authors might like their non-journal publications more – due to more the risky moves that likely to get pushbacks from peer-reviewers. But I wonder: isn’t it that one would need to make some kind of appearance in the top journals in order to be “invited” to contribute to, say, an edited volume? Of course this is not meant to undermine the interestingness of journal papers in any ways, but it seems to me that the signaling effect can easily outweigh the content.
‘But I wonder: isn’t it that one would need to make some kind of appearance in the top journals in order to be “invited” to contribute to, say, an edited volume?’
This may be correct. I strongly suspect that my invitation to submit an article to Singer’s Companion to Ethics, was due to preceding AJP & PQ papers .
I received my first invitation to an edited volume as a PhD student just because I happened to work on a relevant topic and was in the area. A couple of years later, I’ve received a few more invitations, and they’ve been either due to connections or because I just happened to have my paper accepted at the right conference. So really you just need to be visible and work on the right topics. Often, editors will be specifically lookng for a few “young and up-and-coming” names to contribute alongside more established people.
Caveat 1: I suspect this is very different in different sub-disciplines, though. I just happen to work in areas where there are *lots* of edited volumes and special issues.
Caveat 2: My publication record also isn’t horrible, which I guess could have helped a bit, but it was only after the invitations that I got my first Leiter generalist top 10 publication. (Though I did have a few highly ranked value theory ones, admittedly.)
This is correct, whether it’s publishing in “top” journals or many other ways.
Having been involved with many edited volumes on both the editing and contributing sides, I’m not aware of any edited volume that solicits/accepts papers from only “superstar” philosophers or those who’ve published in “top” journals, but I suppose it’s possible someone would attempt that…
Come to think of it, I myself have edited collections featuring papers by younger authors who at the time I selected them did not have publications in top-ten journals. It is just that the papers were obviously good.
I’m pretty much a face in the crowd in the profession but here goes. I have a handful of top-10 pubs but really only one three-pager that I’m proud of among those. I just published last year a chapter in a edited volume that I like a lot–it was fun to write but had a serious take on a big subject. I’m an emeritus prof.
Full Professor (though only fairly recently), 67 yers old, semi-retired at 0.5 FTE
With me its a mix of journal articles – AJP, PQ, Philosophy of the Social Sciences (my most cited paper), Filosofiska Notiser, Social Epistemology, Epistime and Inquiry– book chapters (mostly invited) and Stanford articles. For me pride is not tied to prestige of venues (though my top paper came out in the AJP) but rather philosophical and literary quality and influence. . My number three – a book chapter – earns its place from the fact that the first half is a philosophical dialogue in blank verse in which I use Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as my mouthpiece without breaking character. This was difficult to do and I am proud of my literary success (it is also fairly influential with 92 citations). I have a soft spot for another because I managed to write it in a pastiche of 18th Century prose (though I find it easier to channel Edward Gibbon than David Hume). It is certainly not true in my case that my ‘top-journal’ papers were necessarily either the best, the most challenging to write or the ones with the most influence. I really sweated blood with one of my Stanford articles, but I am very pleased with the result and it is now clocking in with rather more citations than either of my two (reasonably well-cited) PQ articles. My second most cited paper – for many years my first – is an article in Singer’s Companion to Ethics. So far as I can judge, my reputation in South America rests chiefly on that paper. It has 292 citations. So if influence is what you are after, it is probably a mistake to concentrate all your energies on the journals of (almost) total exclusion. Exclusive they may, be that does not entail that they are widely read.
As of about two months ago I am a tenured associate professors (before that untenured assistant). I have no book chapters or invited contributions of any sort (unless you count book reviews, which I guess are technically invited, although the invitation comes because I ask for it…), so I am picking from a limited set of options. But the pieces I am most proud of are my reply pieces, for three main reasons.
First, they are short, and I often don’t find it easy to fit my ideas into short pieces, so I am happy when I can do this.
Second, they contribute to an ongoing conversation in a very direct and focused way. I think it is good to do this. Analytic philosophy is a field where people are pretty bad at citing each other and caring about what other people think, I think. I think we should spend more time caring about what others have said and less about what we have to say. Reply pieces help promote the good kind of atmosphere. Saul Smilansky has a nice paper on this topic, “Do You Have to Reply to This Paper?”
Third, these papers are by far the hardest to publish. A normal paper I can keep sending to journals until it gets published. (Recently I had a paper published that I have been trying to get published since 2014.) So it’s not much of an accomplishment to publish a normal paper. It’s just a matter of getting lucky enough to get 2 sympathetic reviewers. (So, pace what people elsewhere in this discussion have said, I don’t see much cause to be proud of my publications in the tippy-top journals compared to my publications in other journals. Anything can get in any journal if you get lucky with reviewers and nothing can get in any journal if you get unlucky with reviewers.) Reply pieces, meanwhile, are more or less impossible to publish. If the journal for the original piece doesn’t accept replies, then you might as well not even write the reply in the first place. If it does accept replies your lot is not much better, because if you’re rejected you’re basically out of options. If like me you’re lucky enough to work on the best kind of philosophy, you can send it to the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, which accepts reply pieces that reply to stuff in other journals. But if JESP rejects it then you’re totally out of luck. I have lots of dead reply pieces and so I am quite proud of the ones that have survived, like perhaps a salmon might be proud of the few eggs that make it to become adult salmon.
I’m mostly journals across philosophy, history, history of medicine, but I think the place I’m most proud of being published in was “The Library” for some exquisitely recherche work on attribution of several C17th pamphlets.
Incredibly random, incredibly dry, incredibly difficult – and they sent me a nice “Oxford Bibliographical Society” Tote bag along with the printed journal upon publication.
What’s not to like?
It is not strictly an answer to the question, but I once had a referee’s report which described an article I co-authored as a perfect exemplar of how to write both history and philosophy, and that they would be using the article as a model for their students to show them how it was done.
It still brings me joy to think about it, and every once in a while I go back to read the report again to enjoy that feeling again for a little while.
As a philosopher-medical educator for 40 years before being made emeritus professor in 2016, I became part of a long and wonderful tradition in medical education: mentoring medical students, residents, and fellows on their research projects, in my case projects on medical ethics. Many of my mentees went on to publish their work and invited me to join them as a co-author (a status that was not honorific but that I earned by my work on the papers), another wonderful tradition in medical education. I am most proud of these publications and list them first in my CV section on scholarship
Associate Prof here.
I’d say it’s a mix. My chapter on friendship and trust has been the most-downloaded of my publications on philpapers for years. That makes me happy because there’s no point in writing something if people aren’t going to read it.
The books are also milestones, and you get a bit more leeway to say what you really think in a book.
When you’re still seeking career advancement, publications in “top” journals are of course instrumentally important. And that’s fine; I would never criticize someone for trying to get or keep a job in this precarious environment. But the top journals do tend to be pretty conservative, which means that almost everything in them is very good but little is groundbreaking. With edited volumes and the like, there is higher variance: the best stuff is better, and the worst stuff is more prevalent.
I am most proud of my very first publication.
Why? I had been trying to publish, and getting close – but still falling short. This included a revise and resubmit that was ultimately rejected.
So I changed my strategy and decided I was going to take one big idea and drill it down. It was time to go big or go home. I was going to make the paper as long as it needed to be and send it to a top journal in my subdiscipline.
At the time, I was teaching 4 courses a term, sometimes 4 preps, along with summer school. When summer came, I taught in the day and worked in the night. I was hot and tired and miserable. I chain smoked and chewed my fingers until they bled. Once I reached a point when doing anything else would be torture, I sent it out. It was now beyond my control.
When the editorial decision came back as revise and resubmit, I was shocked. Like really shocked. The comments were helpful, I made the revisions, and was shocked – yet again – when it was accepted.
That paper was my ticket to increasingly better jobs and a bit of recognition in my field. That’s not why I’m proud of it. I’m proud of it because I proved to myself that I could do this – even without the resources that my friends at research universities had. It was liberating.
Best answer here, in my opinion!
And congratulations!
I’m most proud of my books, because writing a monograph is a very difficult endeavor where the whole needs to make an overall argument while the individual chapters also do their work. This is very tricky, and if it works, I find it a significant achievement.
It may seem strange, but I’m also quite proud of my public-facing writing, especially my Substack newsletter. I receive messages almost daily from people who say how much these essays resonate with them. I don’t know why they have this impact, maybe it’s the fact that I have no gatekeepers and try to be completely honest.
I feel this conversation has run its course, but I would not mind chirping in. I think my best papers are in Philosophy of Science (my most cited paper), Philosophy of the Social Sciences, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, HOPOS, and an edited volume published in the Boston Studies series. I have a paper in Nous that is good, but not one of my best. What makes the best the best is that I feel they are either creative conceptually, or involve some nice tidying up of an existing literature/debate. I also have a favourite in a journal in another discipline.
“ I feel this conversation has run its course, but I would not mind chirping in.”
You and 50 years of professional philosophers, Gorm 😉
I’m proud of the papers I wrote that developed what I still believe to interesting, original, and provocative thesis. they were all published in journals but the pride I take in my rather limited published work is independent of where it is published or even, in principle, whether it is published at all. The question, as it is posed, strikes me as rather bizarre.
I am proud of my paper “The Dualism of Conceptual Scheme and Undifferentiated Reality” (cited by 1, according to google scholar, actually at least 2) in E-Logos. And quite a few others actually. Too proud perhaps. (A message from the outer reaches of a solar system, metaphorically speaking?)
I just read your paper and found it quite helpful. I’m going to cite it in the master thesis that I’m currently writing on John McDowell’s identity conception of truth. Thank you.