Philosophy’s Journal Problem Captured in One Number?
In the first six months of 2025, a top philosophy journal received 403 submissions. Of those, how many did it accept during that time?
1.
So reports The Journal of Philosophy.
Here are the journal’s 2025 statistics through July 1st, as reported on its memo to authors page:
- Total submissions: 403
- Desk rejections: 192; Avg # Days: 17
- Rejections with comments: 63; Avg # Days: 77
- Revise and Resubmit: 9; Avg # Days: 90
- Accepted: 1; # Days: 61
- Withdrawn/Failed Pre-Assessment: 30
- In progress: 108
That the number of acceptances is one is striking, though I’d caution readers against jumping to conclusions about responsibility here.
UPDATE (9/9/25): I should have pointed this out in the original post, but, as some commenters have noted, the “1” looks worse than it is, since it is only about articles submitted in 2025 (and so does not include papers submitted in 2024 that were accepted for publication in 2025). I’m sorry for not doing so. In addition to adding this note, I have reworded the opening of the post. That said, as other commenters have noted, our familiarity with the “insanely low acceptance rates” in our discipline doesn’t mean there aren’t critical questions to ask about our publishing ecosystem.
(via Simon Goldstein)
In brief: the problem is with us as a discipline creating false scarcity by ascribing such immense importance to an imagined ranking of “top”, “second tier”, “middling” etc. journals for weighing how much a published paper is worth for hiring / promotion / tenure. Yes, there are junk publications who deserve to be ruled out, but the strict hierarchy at the perceived top is pathological.
I think this is partly right. There is a manufactured scarcity problem driven by printing limitations. Journals should move online, which then removes the need to limit the number of acceptances. I think there is value in having some kind of professionally recognized hierarchy of work. At least for myself, I know the difference between a “big idea” paper and a “niche” paper and I don’t think they should be accorded the same degree of recognition. But, we could still–as a field–agree that *these journals* (whatever they are) are for the big idea papers and *those journals* are for “smaller papers”.
Aren’t there still costs associated with typesetting? Having never been involved in the publishing side of things, I don’t know how much less those costs would be then the costs involved in printing (I assume they would be much less), but they wouldn’t be 0.
So, there would still be a cost-driven limit to acceptances, it just might be a much higher limit
T.J.;
Yes, there are, that’s right.
I would say that is one of the two main financial obstacles to setting up online, open access journals. (The other is paying managerial salary.) Editorial help is free, obviously, and maintaining the web site is a very small part of the annual cost.
I say this as one of the founding editors of JESP. And although our acceptance rate is certainly higher than J Phil‘s, we do still reject a lot of papers that I’m sure many Daily Nous readers would think are publishable.
Agreed, costs of copyediting/typesetting and the employment of editorial assistants/managing editors are the big costs – physical printing is pretty negligible.
But I think ‘editorial help is free’ is pretty far from obvious these days. At least outside elite circles, workload models are giving less and less support (teaching or admin relief) for service to the discipline , and more and more administrative burdens on faculty. (For concreteness: as editor of AJP I get no workload relief at all from my institution, and the huge amount of time editing the journal takes is only partly offset by a small amount of buyout from the AAP.) I don’t think this is unusual outside of elite US institutions now. If we like the model of journals where there is editorial accountability, where some individual or small team take responsibility for the editorial direction of the journal, then we are going to need financial models to support those individuals. At present we face the prospect that the only folks who are able to give up time for editorial work are at elite institutions which can afford to recognise this work in their allocations of duties, or retired faculty who can donate their time. These people make great editors, but they aren’t the only ones.
Interesting. I wasn’t thinking about that cost — just the ones that the journals bear themselves.
Are the Editors in Chief of open access online journals getting buy-out or course reductions? I think JESP’s are not.
If journals have to pay that cost, it will be another substantial financial obstacle to open access start-ups. I’m hoping open access is the future, and that it will solve a bunch of our problems, so I’m hoping there’s some other way to enable editors.
I certainly don’t agree to that. It’s a groundless claim. And given the slippery terms, probably impossible to confirm.
It might be worth clarifying that this is how many of the articles submitted in the first six months of 2025 were accepted before 01 July 2025. (This wasn’t immediately obvious to me.)
The total number of acceptances is likely closer to 20 (extrapolating last year’s numbers), but the vast majority of articles were presumably submitted before 01 January 2025.
Consider Ethics that accepted, over all of 2023 (not just first six months), and regardless of when they were submitted, 4 papers
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731076
I think you’ve misunderstood, js.
Four is the number from the 2023 cohort that had been accepted by April 2024. Lots more from that cohort were accepted later, and plenty more from earlier cohorts were accepted in 2023.
The 2022 data in that report is probably more useful as an indicator of the ultimate fate of articles (as against processing time). You can see that all but one of the 510 articles submitted in 2022 had been processed by April 2024, and that 10 (2%) of those articles were accepted and the rest rejected or withdrawn.
In my opinion, the only way that you get a result like this is through mass collective failure of referees. As a field, we need to rethink how implacably hostile and uncharitable we are in reviews. The anonymity makes it hard, and the time pressures involved make rationalizing it very tempting.
Agreed.
Why is this your conclusion? More than half of the rejections were desk rejections or failed pre-assessments, which means those papers never went to referees at all. Of the papers that were sent out, more than half are still listed as “in progress.” In other words, reviewers haven’t even completed their reports yet. And even when referee comments do come back, it is still the editor’s decision whether to reject outright or invite a revise and resubmit.
These numbers suggest that much of the selectivity happens before a paper ever reaches referees, and that the low number of R&Rs may reflect not only the tone of referee reports but also how strictly editors choose to interpret and act on them. To attribute the outcome to referee hostility misses the bigger picture of how editorial practices shape these results.
Yeah, honestly, I could have been leaping to a conclusion here, based on other experiences I have with things. It’s entirely possible that either they’ll have a much better overall year, or that it was editorial and not referee issues. I agree it’s not the best evidence for the conclusion I wanted to draw from it.
A lot of reviewers are hostile because they think, consciously or not, that their job is to enforce ideological orthodoxy.
Most of my published work has defended left wing coded arguments. I am now trying to publish a couple of papers defending right-wing coded arguments on a topic adjacent to economic justice.
The difference of treatment from both reviewers and editors is absolutely shocking. The tone is markedly nastier and meaner, comments are significantly less constructive and more likely to target “unwarranted assumptions” rather than substance, and when they do attack substance it is more on the basis of “it seems to me”, “it is unclear to me”, and idiosyncratic objections. A world apart from the kindness and charity I used to receive when I was writting from across the aisle. It’s mental.
Can confirm, though the ‘leftist’ tint in question is liberal, not socialist leftist or anything of that sort. That is, there’s definitely a centrist liberal bias among a big swath of the review (and so editor?) pool that intentionally or not serves as a gatekeeper of which papers end up in ‘top journals’.
Completely false. At least two papers defending a socialist
or anti-market perspective have been published on economic justice in top generalist journals in the last two years (if you know, then you know), and not a single one defending a pro-market or libertarian PoV.
Not sure that “completely false” and “if you know, you know” signals a productive exchange. Similarly, the vague distinction pro-market vs anti-market, which non-liberal leftists certainly do not take to be the relevant distinction. So, I’ll leave it here.
I think it is understandable that I would not find it appropriate to share these papers on here, they are in fact interesting papers and I would not want to suggest that they were published just because they aligned with the editor’s ideological priors or something.
But the suggestion that socialist, analytic Marxist or anticapitalist philosophy does not get published at top generalist journals is just factually false. A quick glance at these journals’ issues should suffice to disprove it if you don’t believe me.
A quick edit: to be clear, I am /happy/ that top journals publish socialist stuff. That’s awesome! But I want them to publish pro market, classical liberal stuff too, from time to time, ideally mine!
Think that’s bad? Mind went almost forty years without a paper in aesthetics.
I don’t think “Revise and Resubmit: 9” is a “mass collective failure of referees.” FWIW, I am quite grateful to an anonymous referee at Logique et Analyse whom you might consider “implacably hostile and uncharitable.” The hostility improved the article greatly, and charity would have been improper. (I do, unsurprisingly, think that some of his or her initial complaints were incorrect, but s/he should not have been charitable in a difference of opinion.)
Nothing too odd about these numbers at the six-month mark, I think? I’d want to see what happens with the 9 papers currently being revised and the 108 in progress before drawing any conclusions.
How long should we wait?
No hard and fast rules here, since norms about how long peer review should take vary by field, different journals have faster and slower processes, etc etc. But, at the very least, I’d want to know what the average time is for papers at this journal to get from initial submission to final decision, and then start from there.
I’m just not sure that these stats are of any real use when so little has been settled. For example, of those 403 papers, some will have been submitted in the week before the stats were published! And, in my experience at least, submissions are higher during the summer months, so I wouldn’t assume those 403 submissions are evenly spaced over the previous 6 months.
There may well be problems with this or any other journal, but ‘of the papers submitted in the pst 6 months, how many have been accepted’ is a pretty useless signal here.
A lot will depend on how long authors take to send them back. And that varies a lot.
Yep, if 1 paper was accepted without revisions, that’s probably a higher number than I’d have guessed for similar journals. Last I looked the Review didn’t have any accept without revisions for several years.
It looks like last year they accepted 90% of R&R’s, so it’s more like 9 papers that will get through.
That’s on the low side. But the stats for 2024 suggested they accepted more than they published, so they may have had to tighten up a bit.
They only have so much publishing space, and if they are sent 30 times more papers than they have space for, there is only so much they can do. Asking them to just magically have more money would not be realistic at the best of times, and for Columbia staff & faculty right now it’s hardly the best of times.
This hits close to the mark, Brian. Thanks for your comment.
Is it fair to say, then, that papers submitted this year have a lower chance of acceptance than those submitted last year?
Slightly lower, yes. But hopefully we won’t keep authors waiting so long for our decision.
Yes, exactly. The only thing that we learn from the single acceptance is what we all knew: major journals very rarely accept a paper without first putting them through the coals of R&R. I’m not a fan of this tradition, but, if anything, I am surprised there was even one.
Yep, this is right. In fact, it would be odd if more than one paper were accepted within six months at JPhil as that basically implies ‘accept no revisions’ – and we should expect that to be very very rare at any top 5 journal.
Exactly. Nothing odd. There is a big problem here, but it’s not J Phil specific. It’s the slowness of the process, which is largely the fault of all of us as referees.
Have they tried giving reviewers Applebee’s discount coupons?
Very amusing Remis, but you remind me of someone who sat at my desk. He said he was told to, despite the numerous alternative desks. Anyway, I wonder if some philosophers deliberately put faults in their paper, to distract the reviewers from more subtle faults (Mitchell in Aroesti in Edward 2025).
I recently got a rejection with comments from JPhil after six or seven months. I wouldn’t say it was worth the wait, though I guess your mileage may vary.
It seems ridiculous to me, however, that comments are only guaranteed after six months.
They sometimes fail to live up to their guarantee of comments after six months.
The quality of editorial competence varies widely across journals. Some have established effective systems that work well; others, not so much. I wish editors compared notes more often so that good practices could spread.
Rejecting a manuscript in philosophy is all too easy. A trained philosopher can always find something objectionable. I’d even bet some of the top essays by Quine or Kripke, say, would be rejected in today’s philosophical climate.
Scarcity by itself is hardly a criterion of quality under such circumstances.
In my (limited) experience reviewing, I find myself frequently writing, “while the paper needn’t convince the reviewer in order to be acceptable for publication,….”
It’s frankly hard to imagine Two Dogmas being accepted now. In many ways it’s sloppy work, and many a person has come away from reading it not quite sure what the steps in the argument are.
Yet it is imaginative. It sees differently. That is what we are losing in this peer review environment – especially from younger scholars
I like to think that, as referee, I would have told Quine to shorten all that stuff about circularity in sections 1-4, because section 5 about the web of belief is the interesting and eye-opening stuff. But for better and for worse, arguments are the part that people find it easier to engage with and ask for more precision on.
As someone that came into the profession in the 2010s, it’s always seemed irreparably status-driven. I lost papers for over a year at key times on the job market due to trying to crack a ‘big’ journal. The lower the numbers accepted, the greater the potential role of bias, overvaluing of one’s own opinion/judgement, and the overvaluing of particular trendy topics that aren’t inherently more valuable than those that tend to end up in the ‘less good’ journals. I’m lucky enough to have managed eventually to get a decent job in a nice department, but I feel like even submitting to some of the top-ranked general journals would be to seek a validation that I don’t even value anymore.
How does this provide evidence of a problem with philosophy (the discipline)? Does it even provide evidence of a problem with the Journal of Philosophy? The number of papers submitted in 2025 that have been given an accept verdict as of July 1, 2025, tells us very little about what percentage will eventually be given an accept verdict. So, all this tells us that a very small percentage of papers submitted to the Journal of Philosophy will receive an acceptance in six months or less. No surprise there. And is this supposed to be a problem? We would expect any papers submitted in the last three months or so to have been given an accept verdict rather than, say, an R&R verdict?
I find this a disturbing response, though not an unsurprising one given that we know you must have views like this from your own editorship.
I take it your views are sincerely held. Does it give you no pause, though, that so much effort is expended to artificially limit the number of papers published? Whether those limits are artificially imposed by aiming for prestige, or by publisher page limits, I take them to be artificial). How many of the rejected papers eventually find homes in excellent journals? I expect it’s a significant percentage. Which means the current system multiplies the amount of effort necessary to publish papers, which contributes to our enormous difficulties reviewing and finding reviewers.
All of this seems like an indication that something is wrong here.
What does the comment you’re replying to have to with artificially limiting the number of papers published?
Thanks, Neil.
Maybe I could have been clearer. Let me try again.
I take it scarcity – in the number of papers published in a journal – drives the need for high rejection rates. Or perhaps a desire for high rejection rates drives the scarcity in publishing slots. Regardless of the exact causal relationship, the two are obviously correlated. The evidence we are talking about here involves high rates of rejection, and slow rates of evaluation. I was suggesting that the slow rate of evaluation is partially driven by the scarcity/rejection rates, because of the burden it puts on us as referees.
If we didn’t reject so many papers, we would have fewer referee reports that would be required. This would mean significantly less burden on referees. Then, it wouldn’t take so long to review things. Moreover, more papers would be accepted in a 6 month period than 1.
Taking more than 6 months to review every paper that isn’t desk rejected is a very long time. Having only 1 paper accepted within 6 months seems very low. Also, if we look at past years, the overall acceptance rate is incredibly small (as some others have pointed out above). The direct acceptance rate is of course even tinier.
All of these things seem to indicate a problem to me. What I found disturbing was that this didn’t bother Prof. Portmore. Perhaps there is no other way of doing things (though I don’t think that’s true), but we should at least recognize that this is an indicator of some serious problems. Can’t we at least agree that this is less than optimal?
I think it’s important not to conflate scarcity with rejection rate. One important reason for journals to limit the number of papers they publish is because readers have limited time and attention, and that is one of the most valuable resources that journals are managing. But if readers can deal with 100 papers a year from a journal, that number doesn’t change if the number of submissions is 200 or 1000 or 5000, so the rejection rate is going to have to change.
I don’t know how to better align the attention of readers with the output of writers, so that not so much has to be rejected to keep things manageable.
Dear Junior Faculty: My post didn’t talk about selectivity (artificial or otherwise). My point was that the fact that only one paper from all those that had been submitted from January 1 to July 1 had been accepted for publication by July 1 doesn’t tell us anything about selectivity. To illustrate, consider HP (Hypothetical Journal). Suppose that the quickest it can render a verdict of “accept” is 8 months. Thus, of all the submissions it received from January 1 to July 1, none have been given a verdict of “accept” by July 1 (that is, within six months). What does that tell us about how selective HP is? Nothing. This is why this whole post is so misleading. To imply, as the original post does, that the fact that only one paper from all those that had been submitted to the Journal of Philosophy from January 1 to July 1 has been accepted by July 1 is indicative of some problem is extremely misleading.
I responded to Prof. Levy above, but I take my response to be relevant to this as well.
I would be disturbed by either (A) a journal’s taking more than 6 months to review every paper that isn’t desk rejected or (B) a journal’s having only 1 paper accepted within 6 months, but A is false and there’s no evidence of B. According to their report, 245 submissions were rejected with comments (and that means that these were not desk rejected) in an average of 4 months’ time. How, then, is it possible that the journal is “taking more than 6 months to review every paper that isn’t desk rejected”? And what they reported was that only one of the papers that had been submitted between January 1 and July 1 was accepted. They didn’t report that “only 1 paper [was] accepted within 6 months.” Presumably, several papers that were submitted in 2024 (that is, prior to January 1, 2025) were accepted between January 1, 2025, and July 1, 2025. In the future, please just ask me what I find disturbing rather than post your assumptions about me, because you don’t seem to be very charitable when it comes to me, and I don’t know why. I’m not some evil Editor who is seeking power and glory at the expense of the little guy. I’m just trying to do the best I can by the profession and to give back to this profession some of all the good that I got from it. Thus, I’m entirely open to doing things better. And if I’m not doing well by profession, I would be glad to step down and let someone else do the job.
Something I found interesting about a recent reject at a top specialist journal was how explicitly the reviewers were weighing the prestige of the journal in their decision. Both reviewers wrote things like ‘this would be acceptable in another journal, but since this is the premiere philosophy of x journal…’ Often these complaints weren’t even about what I was saying, instead most of them were about the literature I was citing which was mostly from an applied area of philosophy of x (published in respectable journals in philosophy of x). Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what to think about comments framed this way, but if reviewers are weighing the prestige of journals this heavily in their decision making, then the result above is hardly surprising.
A light-hearted but sincere update in the year of our lord, 2025, for the seemingly few good-natured reviewers among us who care to see good work published in less than three years from initial submission:
‘Accept’ means ‘RR’
‘RR’ means ‘Reject’
‘Reject’ means ‘Go to hell’
Someone should write a dialogue where Socrates questions journal referees and journal rankers. Should be fun to read.
May I urge the full professors who run our discipline’s fanciest journals not to so cavalierly circle the wagons, as they so often do when us hoi polloi express frustration with the journal system that nearly everyone else agrees is beyond broken, and instead read with an empathetic eye?
I see several problems with the Journal of Philosophy’s reporting here. I recognize that others have already tried to defend the journal but I think those defenses are very poor (if nonetheless understandable). It’s an embarrassment that a journal would only accept one article in six months even if it will ultimately come to accept a greater number than that over the course of the year. It’s an embarrassment because a well-run system should not take 9-18 months to process a submission. It points to systemic problems.
So here are some proposals to fix these problems:
To solve the space issue: Accept more papers! Let’s say that the journal shifts from accepting 20 papers a year to accepting 100. Not only would this benefit the profession as a whole, it wouldn’t even hurt the journal’s reputation: Assuming it gets the same number of submissions in the second half of 2025 as it did in the first half, accepting 100 papers means the journal would have a 12.5% acceptance rate! This is hardly the mark of a non-selective journal.
I can already hear you saying: “But the journal doesn’t have room to publish 100 papers a year in its hard copy!!!” And I think that’s fine. Perhaps appearance in the hard copy of the journal is reserved for the 20 “best” papers accepted that year. Appearance in hard copy could function as a secondary marker of prestige but this wouldn’t really hurt the 80 other papers that are accepted and published in the online version of one of the discipline’s premier journals.
If all journals moved to a two-tiered system like this (e.g., a five fold increase in acceptances with only some appearing in hard copy) it would drastically reduce the number of papers floating around in the peer-review system: every paper rejected at JoP is going to submitted somewhere else and the same holds for other journals.
What about reviewers? We’ve discussed this a lot at DN. While some journals might experiment with paying their reviewers, I can imagine that this would get too expensive for most venues given the volume of referring that needs to be done. Maybe reviewers could earn “credits” with a journal that they can spend in different ways. For example, perhaps you can spend those credits to guarantee a faster review time from editors or perhaps credits could be spent in lieu of cash so that accepted articles are published as Open Access? In other words, make the job of reviewing worth something to the reviewer so that they not only agree to review but spend more time ensuring that they’re producing quality reviews.
The worst thing we can do is pretend like this is how things are supposed to be, that the peer-review journal system is running well. It isn’t and it needs to change. I think it’s too late to avoid the iceberg, we’ve already hit it, but let’s not keep the band playing while the ship sinks. We need to change this now.
You write: “It’s an embarrassment that a journal would only accept one article in six months.” Indeed. But that’s not what they reported. They reported that, of those papers that had been submitted from January 1 to July 1, only one had been accepted as of July 1. That’s not at all the same as reporting that they accepted only one paper from January 1 to July 1. Many journals go through one or two rounds of revise-and-resubmission. Given this, most papers have to wait more than six months before it’s even possible for them to complete these rounds of revise-and-resubmission. It’s, thus, unsurprising that only one paper that was submitted in the past six months has been given an “accept” verdict.
Accept more papers? No, Let’s not. The idea that accepting five times as many papers as now would be a Good Thing presupposes that five times as many papers as now deserve to be published. For that to be the case, five times as many papers as currently see the light of print would have to be saying something well-argued, well-researched and interesting about topics that are worth discussing. I have refereed for 55 journals (including most of the top ones) over a 35 year period and I think I am rather more charitable than the general run of referees since my personal ‘rejection’ rate is a fair bit lower than the rejection rate of the journals for which I have refereed. But I am pretty confident that the 50% of papers that I have ‘rejected’ did not meet the above criteria and hence did not deserve to be published. Indeed I think was doing the world a favour by keeping them out of print. The point of publication is not to advance the careers of aspiring philosophers but to advance the philosophical debate. (It may be that the world, or at least society, owes us all a living, but the philosophical community does not owe any of us a publication in a top journal. That has to be earned.) Publishing five times as many papers would not advance the philosophical debate but would merely flood the zone with reams of dreary rubbish. And it would make the ‘Which papers should I read?’ problem five times more difficult. Moreover, in the long term it would not even help the aspiring philosophers, since the career-promoting value of a paper in a top journal would be subject to inflationary effects. If a journal X published five times as many papers as it did before, then the career-promoting value of paper in journal X would sink to about a fifth of what it once was. The only papers that would retain their career-enhancing value would be those featured in the best-paper print version, for which spots the competition would be just as savage as it is at present.
An idea that might reduce turnaround times and obviate the problem of catering to two referees with contradictory gripes would be to cut the usual number of referees from two to one. This would not result in more acceptances (since there would be a fifty percent chance of encountering ‘evil reviewer #2’) but it would make the task of finding reviewers half as onerous, and significantly less time-consuming for editors hence expediting the process. Moreover, for any given paper there would be one less bod to prod if the report came in late.
And another thing. The hostility to editors displayed on this thread is astonishing. Refereeing is enough of a chore but I personally could not face the torment of reading through scads of papers many of which are not worth publishing. It would destroy my joy in philosophy. Those (presumably made of sterner stuff) who are willing to do this deserve our gratitude.
I’ll repeat my perennial observation that a lot of philosophy’s reviewing issues (difficulty finding reviewers, very low acceptance rates, very long time to eventually get a paper published) are fairly predictable consequences of an ecosystem where most of the highly reputed journals are generalist. Philosophy of science publication (anecdotally) works quite a bit better than the philosophy average and I think that’s a large part of the reason.
Sounds right to me. I’d like to read a longer version; you should write it up and send it to Justin!
I think that once was true. I don’t think it is true anymore. Especially in the past couple of years the experience has rapidly deteriorated even for HPS. Some journals have papers sitting for up to 3 months before they enter review and I have heard many reports of a select few journals who have had papers sitting with editors for more than 6 months AFTER reviews were completed. In addition, I’m getting increasingly many clearly LLM-written papers that somehow make it past the editor’s of top HPS journals….
That doesn’t match my experience or those I’ve heard from, but obviously it’s difficult to make reliable estimates either way on the basis of anecdote, especially for a comparatively short period like a couple of years.
To see whether there is a problem with philosophy as a discipline, the obvious first thing to do is to compare to other fields. In economics, top journals will produce similarly low acceptance rates, albeit perhaps on average a bit higher.
But you didn’t randomly choose economics, you obviously choose it because it is the most widely mentioned academic discipline with a completely dysfunctional journal system where there are five elite journals that are in a class of their own and publishing at least once in one of them makes or breaks your career. Why not say that there is a problem with disciplines like philosophy and economics where prestige bias reigns supreme and career success is highly dependent on getting published in a small number of elite journals with narrow interests that are mostly controlled by senior academics at a handful of elite American and British universities. All academic disciplines have some version of prestige hierarchies, yet most of them are much more eclectic and diverse, and have much less dysfunctional journal systems than philosophy and economics.
No, I did randomly choose economics, although I have some familiarity. I am open to rebuttal on this, my point was in the first sentence of my comment. I really think there is a simple test here, to look the numbers and compare across disciplines. Of course, this does leave open the option that some further factor can explain the discrepancy or lack thereof.
Generally, we should be more systematic. Yes, on the individual perception level, some salient facts seem to stand out: the extremely low acceptance rates and the fact that nonetheless some people seem to publish with ease in these journals and often excubarantly so. It also seems true that generalist journals very much err on the side of epistemology, metaphysics and other areas of so-called theoretical philosophy. Owever, without data and comparison to kther fields, no conclusions can be drawn. The system is largely merit-based, so it is absolutely possible that some outstanding individuals working in certain fields just deserve to be published more than the rest of us. And it is also possible that focus on merit leads to the kind of exclusivity in publishing channels as we in other fields as well. Or none of these might be true. Evidende from ones perception and others’ say-so won’t decide the matter, though.
Publishing in economics has also lower stakes because Econ, just like law, has a healthier job market.
Again, fair enough, but this was not my point. In the grand scheme of things – getting jobs, e.g. – this also matters, no doubt.
At least in the empirical sciences, acceptance rates are generally much higher but that partly reflects the fact that research needs funding, and so the grant application process is a prior filter on work.
I think the real problem is lack of transparency. There is no universal practice of disclosing all the relevant statistics, such as number of submissions or acceptance rates. By every journal. Automatically. Every year. It is just weird. If this happens, and happens in every scientific discipline, we can make a good comparison and then come up with explanations. But until this happens, we are just quavering in the dark, making allegations (dare I say, accusations) that lack proper evidence. This is of course no surprise, lack of transparency and evidence, leads typically to rumors of this kind everywhere in society.
It’s interesting that this post was prompted by an associate prof and 3x publisher in The Journal of Philosophy, 4x in Mind, 2x in PPR, 1x in Nous, 3x in Phil Imprint, etc., and all the people in the comments suggesting that there isn’t really anything to see here are similarly well published but more senior.
Is what’s happening here generational? Is what explains it that the more senior members of our profession got their share of the top journal pie before journal standards became ludicrous, and so they never quite went through this maddening and career-arresting bullshit?
Publishing is tied to so many material goods (job location, promotions, merit raises, grant competitiveness, etc.) that the only way I can understand when someone responds to this situation by defending any part of it is that they haven’t quite lost much from it.
There’s a problem when publication is treated exclusively as a service to the author, rather than as a service to the reader.
I don’t know how to enumerate all the problems with publishing, but I do think it’s appropriate when someone points out one problem that is caused by having a particular practice, for someone else to point out another problem that would be caused by eliminating that practice. There are many deep problems here, and I don’t think it’s helpful to condemn “defending any part of it”.
A few days ago I sent an article to a preprint site. This article has already been peer reviewed and revised, and it is published. I just needed to put it up somewhere so that I could email a link to it. It’s a 26 page paper. Within a few hours of sending it off I got an email back saying that it didn’t meet the standards to be put up on the preprint site. Ya know, a preprint site, full of the wildest, most bonkers shit you can imagine. I think we need to chill.
As a student philosopher, can someone help me understand what the goals are for this journal? While one acceptance does seem surprisingly low, I have no context on what the journal’s aims are, and whether these aims are considered normal.
Is this journal primarily interested in historical and exegetical philosophy?Does the journal prefer conceptual analysis of more abstract notions such as justice, freedom, etc.?Does this journal welcome philosophy on comparatively fast-paced scientific fields of inquiry?Does the journal aim to provide critical evaluations of current events?
I imagine 1 and 2 can take all the time they want. But for anyone doing 3 and 4, this journal would not meet those goals, as those areas will have long moved on before the paper is published.
Hi, I manage The Journal of Philosophy. Here is some information from our website:
“The papers we publish make sustained, original contributions to meaningful debates in the field, as judged by the editors. The Journal of Philosophy is extremely selective and publishes philosophical scholarship of exceptional quality. The Journal adheres to strict academic standards and focuses on research in the analytic philosophical tradition. We recommend that authors check recent volumes to get a clear sense of the Journal‘s scope….The Journal of Philosophy does not publish papers that are primarily historical or expository. Currently, the editors are not considering experimental philosophy.”
This journal is among the most competitive philosophy journals in the world and has a strong history of publishing papers in the philosophy of science, although at this time we’re not ideally suited to fast-paced debates.
I don’t know why this question doesn’t get approved, I’m genuinely puzzled what an “expository paper” is. To my mind, all papers are expository. Yet since one of the top journals in the profession doesn’t welcome them, I gather this is language that refers to some specific types of papers and I have no idea what those are. It would be helpful to know, from the journal’s editors or others if they know, what this kind of paper that is not welcome is. (“Historical papers” I get.)
The term “expository paper” is usually used for something like an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or Philosophy Compass, that aims to collate and systematize existing work, but doesn’t aim to produce anything new. Obviously, there’s a gradation in terms of what counts as “new”, but this is the distinction, and some version of it is relevant in all media.
I don’t get the hate in the comments. You don’t like this journal? Submit elsewhere.
My first reaction is: it’s not that simple. We are not talking about a preferred flavour of ice cream here. People’s careers are at stake. But then again, yes, people in philosophy could simply choose to stop playing the game. But all or most philosophers would have to agree on this. So we get the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Since a number of people above have pointed out and are perhaps wondering: since the number of acceptances (i.e., 1) only reflects those submitted in 2025, could the Journal of Philosophy clarify how many papers they have *actually* accepted this year (up until July 1 or more recently), inclusive of manuscripts submitted in 2024? That would illuminate a much more helpful picture for the processing rates at JPhil.
Also looking at the stats from 2024 to 2025, it seems like JPhil has experienced a rather significant reduction in turnaround (almost by 50%, along some metric). This is certainly laudable, and it seems to me highly worth sharing how this is accomplished at JPhil–both for other journals who could use some of the efforts that proved helpful at JPhil, and for the community for transparency reasons, e.g., if JPhil recently implemented change in their peer-review procedure. (One of the welcoming trends in philosophy journal practices in recent years is the increasing number of journals that are extremely forthcoming about their review process in-house.) Could Alyssa or others with knowledge illuminate?
Yes, I can follow up to say more in the next day or two. Thanks!
Ok, by my count JPhil has accepted about 25 papers during 2025 with the following breakdown:
3 submitted in 2025
20 originally submitted in 2024, 2 without a round of review and 18 with at least one round of review
1 to 3 papers submitted in 2023 (Sorry not to be precise here.)
I appreciate all the discussion on this thread, and I’m sorry that the count on our website has caused confusion.
To improve turnaround time, we’ve mainly tried to be more aggressive at the start of the review process. This includes:
We are also
“identifying and asking more referee candidates” – this is key. I’m surprised when I hear that journal editors have only been asking one or two referees at a time and complain about a high rate of rejection. If you have a high rejection rate from referees, you should regularly ask more than you need and if first one or two happen to say “yes” (depending on how many referees you want) you can tell the other ones their services are no longer required. They’ll probably be relieved. Also: referees should be given a maximum of 4 weeks to return a verdict.
Yes, it’s like referee Tetris now.
We standardly ask for a report within a month but often get requests for extensions. We are usually willing to wait up to two months.
This is a double-edged sword. (Which isn’t to say it’s the wrong choice for JPhil). If you look for 4 referees rather than 2, then (a) inevitably you’re asking people who are less good fits to the paper than if you only asked 2, and (b) it’s easier for people to say no, because they know that you’re asking multiple people at once.
Thanks — this is super helpful and I hope this would be helpful for other journals. Quick question: Would you be able to quickly clarify what the “committee review” entails at JPhil, assuming that that’s the committee of Executive Editors? It seems to me that at many places the handling Editor (i.e., an Associate Editor) issues the verdict (with an often pro forma approval from the Editor in Chief).
Sure, I circulate a weekly email with all the papers and reports that I think are ready for the Executive Editors’ discussion/decision. I also meet regularly with some of them to go over active items.
Please feel free to email me if you have more specific questions. managingeditor at journalofphilosophy dot org
The way that a lot of journals report these “accept” statistics is common but misleading to people who don’t know the lingo. It seems common to talk about “acceptances” and “acceptance rates” based only on what is accepted in the first round of review. Most papers go through at least one round of revise and resubmit – and this is a good thing. Some of the time from first submission to initial publication is waiting on reviewers to submit reviews and handling editors to make decisions, but actually most of it, most of the time, is the time it takes authors to revise the paper and resubmit. I’m actually surprised that 6-month acceptance number is >0 at a top journal. I run a much more niche journal, and it is very rare that we accept a paper in the first round, because most papers need at least a little work. I also think it is better to report acceptance rates in terms of the number of papers that make it through the pipeline from initial submission through any number of revisions to publication, rather than only in terms of the single-round numbers. This is what we do (thanks to my predecessor), and I am glad we do it, even though it may make us look less “selective.”
FWIW, around once a year Ethics publishes a breakdown that should enable those who look at it to get a pretty good idea of what happens at each stage. (I haven’t looked at it in a year or two, but I suspect this hasn’t changed.) I don’t think it is the only journal that does that. As many have pointed out, many papers that are not accepted at a first stage are accepted after revisions.
It is a fraction of the initial submissions, but there is also a lot of stuff sent to journals that warrants not making it all that far in the refereeing process. Many journals have one or two editors who do an initial cut. They read a shitload more than I could. They make a rough judgement and send it on to further editors who might also desk reject after more careful reads or send it to referees. My experience as an editor/assoc editor who tries/tried to meet a 3 months to a verdict targets was that most papers get done in that time but a few take forever because the same people get asked to do all the refereeing and they are just too busy. Feminism/gender is one area that was really hard to find referees for a couple of years ago. Topics that are hot tend to be hard to find referees for. Those were the ones that had me pulling out my hair.
One aspect to this is that editors have to trust the verdicts of referees. We generally start out with people we know enough about to trust. They’re too busy. So they recommend someone else. By the time you’ve repeated this process six times you have no idea how reliable your referee is/referees are when someone finally accepts the job. And then they send in a two sentence report with a accept/don’t accept recommendation with little rationale. It is very hard to know how to take that report.
I don’t think the initial posting did the topic justice. We have a problem, but it is not that a journal has only gotten one paper to full acceptance in 6 months. The underlying problem is the amount of work to be done given the pressure to publish that many in the profession face (which causes a lot to be sent out that isn’t ready) and the shortage of people to do the work. (There is also an underlying problem that is creating that pressure to publish but it is even more beyond our control than the responses to the pressure.)
That’s absolutely right. And each year (in the October issue), the Editor-in-Chief writes an editorial that includes tables on all the relevant statistics as well as some editorial comments on those statistics. The October 2025 issue, with my latest editorial, is coming out very soon. Also, I’m always happy to answer any questions people have about how the journal runs or running. But please direct all correspondence to the managing editor (see https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/et/board#contact). Since we practice triple-blind review, it’s important that all correspondence goes to him in the first instance.