CV Do’s and Don’ts
I’ve been asked to put up a post about what goes under the “publications” heading on a cv, but I thought we could expand the discussion to include other bits of cv-related advice for job applicants.
Here’s the main thing I was asked to convey: the only things that should be listed under unqualified cv headings like “publications” or “academic articles” or “books” or “book chapters,” etc., are writings that either actually have been published or that have actually been accepted for publication.
Writings that have been submitted for review and which, as far as you know, are being considered for publication, but have not yet been accepted for publication, should not be listed under “publications”. Instead, you can have a section on your cv called “Currently Under Review” and list them there. This includes even invited pieces that are a “sure thing” and revise and resubmit resubmissions. They haven’t yet been accepted, so they are not “publications”.
Relatedly, it’s a good idea to be clear about the types of publications you list, being sure to distinguish peer-reviewed from non-peer-reviewed articles, for example.
Also, for the love of MIND, do not do that thing where you list on your cv, next to the title of your as-of-yet-unaccepted submission, the name of the journal to which you submitted it. One usually only sees this when the journal is especially prestigious. I understand why someone may be tempted to do it, but please trust me when I say that trying to impress people by telling them how highly you rate yourself is rarely a winning move.
Readers, feel free to add your own two cents.
Related: “Some Things You Always Wanted to Know about CVs and Weren’t Afraid to Ask“, “Invitations, Under Review, and other CV Questions“
Although I don’t do that myself, I think it’s fair to include papers/books that are not accepted but *publicly available* online (be that on PhilPapers or personal website or…) under the “publications” heading. It should be clear to anyone reading it that the piece has not went through the peer-review anyway.
I would recommend listing things that are publicly available under works in progress. But if it is no longer work in progress, it is still worth spelling out that it is not a *peer reviewed* publication. It is really worth getting out of one’s way to avoid any room for misinterpretation that you are trying to deceive people.
Thanks, I’ll just add a few more words as a response to you and some posters below.
(1) It was implicit in my comment that such a piece is, in one way or another, flagged as non peer-reviewed. Indeed, what I had in mind is a description of the form: “available online only at: [repository website]”, which anyone who actually reads words and not just gauges text volume under the relevant heading understands to imply that the thing didn’t go through a formal peer review. This is common in exact sciences, and afaik not uncommon in some more technical fields of philosophy (e.g., philosophy of physics). That being said, I agree it might look sketchy if a large chunk (let alone all) of someone’s “publications” are like this.
(2) This was never meant to be an advice on how to prepare a good-looking CV for hiring committees. I just said I think it is “fair”, i.e., not deceitful, to do this (subject to appropriate description as above). But I take the point: this was a post with CV-related advice, so a comment like this can be taken as an advice. And since many who are in hiring committees do not share my opinion (as witnessed below), it would be a bad advice. Thankfully my username should prevent anyone from following it.
justifiably or not, some people in our profession think you’re trying to mislead them when you put things that aren’t publications in the publications section on your CV. I’ve seen this on committees firsthand. so just don’t do ever do it, there isn’t any more to say on the matter.
Absolutely do not do that. This is no different than listing “under review” papers under publications. Keep in mind that CVs are often skimmed through, not really read carefully. If a reader (e.g., a hiring committee member) first gets the impression that you have several publications, but on closer inspection realizes that most of them are merely “publicly available”, chances are they’re going to feel misled, and to feel that you only added those items to inflate your publications section.
The publications section is for papers published in academic venues. Not for papers published somewhere.
I’d worry about this too. I like listing publicly available works under a “Public Philosophy” section where I also list interviews etc. just to avoid any confusion.
DO NOT DO THIS. Being publicly available is NOT the same as being published. You identify as a grad student, take it from me, someone who is 25-years post-PhD. Whoever has led you to believe this is acceptable is undermining your chances at a career. Anyone can post anything on personal websites and almost anything on PhilPapers.
I just want to echo others and say that this is horrible advice. Do no follow it. If it is not published in the traditional sense of the word, it is not a publication.
If these kinds of writings are actually an important merit for you, then the appropriate way would be to EITHER A) subdivide ‘Publications’ to 1) academic peer-reviewed, 2) academic non-peer-reviewed, 3) publications for popular audiences (which can then include anything from a mass market paperback to a magazine article or online text), and of course you could also have 4) publications for professional audiences (such as when a bioethicist has an opinion column in a publication for medical doctors); OR B) reserve ‘publications’ for academic publications (labeling non-peer-reviewed ones clearly), and have a separate section for ‘public outreach’, ‘writings for popular audiences’, or similar.
It’s imperative not to pool them together under the same heading. That can make readers think you either are trying to make yourself look more accomplished, in terms of scholarly output, than you actually are; or don’t understand why the difference matters.
THANK YOU!! I have seen multiple ABD students at fancy places ([redacted]) who have a bunch of “under review” papers listed under publications to hide the fact that they do not, in fact, have any publications.
I don’t know who is telling them that this is alright, but it is annoying and does not make a candidate look better (for some it might be neutral, for me it makes them look worse).
Gently, I wish senior people in the profession and people on search committees would chill a bit about how junior people make tiny formatting choices on their CV. If someone is currently a grad student, then you can infer that their department/supervisor has looked at their CV and probably given them explicit advice about what to put on it. If you disagree with the advice, take it up with the tenured supervisor rather than the ABD student.
Also, philosophers are supposed to have exceptional reading comprehension. If you can read that a given paper is under review … then you know it is under review.
This is a global profession full of people trying to accommodate conflicting local, departmental, linguistic, national level norms. It’s also full of people facing job insecurity and people working way over fulltime hours. Let’s err on the side of giving each other a bit of grace and not encourage paranoia over the wording of CV headers.
Do not, under any circumstances, include a photograph of yourself (or anything else) on your CV.
While I generally agree that you should not do this, everyone should note that it is a common requirement in certain countries to include a photo, and search committees who do not want to unfairly discriminate against candidates from other countries should not punish candidates who do not know not to do this for applications for jobs in your country.
Thank you for saying this! I’m on committees and I’ll make sure to keep it in mind.
It seems to me that this sadly varies with national conventions. Although I’d prefer it was different and discrimination and bias conscious conventions were the norm, in Germany for example you are still pretty much expected to include a professional photograph with your application even in academia. This, of course, can vary by discipline or even department.
“it’s a good idea to be clear about the types of publications you list, being sure to distinguish peer-reviewed from non-peer-reviewed articles, for example“.
How far does this norm extend? Ought one to distinguish between:
-Venue (e.g., journal / edited collection / conference proceedings)
-Kind of journal issue (e.g., regular issue / special issue)
-Kind of submission (e.g., submitted article / invited article)
-Method of peer-review (e.g., reviewed paper / reviewed abstract)
-Kind of article (e.g., original article / discussion article / survey article)
-(If kind of article): kind of discussion article (e.g., 2-page peer commentary / 15-page extended discussion)?
It used to be normal for us to distinguish between normal articles and special issue contributions, but we don’t really seem to any more. At least partly, I think this is because special issues used to be much more invite-only.
I think it is useful to distinguish:
books authoredbooks and special issues editedpeer reviewed journal articlesother peer reviewed essay-length items (book chapters, conference proceedings, etc.)book reviewsnon-peer-reviewed items
I’ve seen a bunch of different practices on CVs – some have separate sections for journals and invited volumes; some have separate sections for book reviews; some have separate sections for books (sometimes authored and edited together, sometimes separate). I separate my works into “original research” and “expository” (including book reviews, encyclopedia articles, and handbook works), though this doesn’t exactly correspond to the other kinds of separations I’ve seen.
I also find it misleading when people list very short discussion pieces in the same category as regular journal articles, without including the page numbers or any other indication that it isn’t a standard journal article.
I am not sure it is misleading, but definitely it can be *annoying* to find that a job applicant has done this. And the risk of causing such annoyance should be thought about.
The same, for what it’s worth, goes on in my mind when one of those Cambridge Elements texts is listed on a CV as if it were a CUP monograph!!
With the full disclosure that I am in the process of producing such an Element, they are (quite literally) CUP monographs. Similarly, discussion pieces (if peer-reviewed) are peer-reviewed articles.
I’m with Julia that not including page numbers can be misleading, and there might be some context in which it makes sense to distinguish various kinds of peer-reviewed articles. Maybe we should have a norm of listing page numbers for books in addition to articles.
But — to play the pedantic philosopher — if it’s not actually misleading, then it seems like culpability for the annoyance lies on the annoyed party. And as someone recently on the market, my own impression is that there are so many things that people can find annoying (your topic, your advisor, overselling your work, your citation practices, you name it) that even just “thinking about” all of them is asking a lot.
Yeah, it seems to me that it’s still a book. One could certainly note the series, but it doesn’t bother me at all.
Technically Cambridge Elements books are CUP monographs. But they clearly don’t have, and shouldn’t have, the same status as normal CUP CUP monographs. They are not achievements on the same level. They are a different kind of thing – a different sort of research output for which I’m not sure we have a good label yet. By listing an Element in a way that would lead your intended reader (a busy academic who is working through a pile of CVs) to think even for a few moments that you have a normal CUP monograph think you are being misleading. If they have to look up and check the type of CUP monograph you have, and they discover it is an Elements book, it is likely just going to annoy them.
And, FWIW – I don’t have anything against Cambridge Elements – I think its a great thing that they exist and I’d like to see the profession move more in the direction of such publications. I’d look very favorably on a candidate who had a Cambridge Elements book – it would just rub me the wrong way if they presented it in an an ambiguous way.
I don’t think it’s helpful to think of CV issues in terms of “culpability”. No one is punishing anyone here.
The question is just what the social expectations are, and if you do something that doesn’t meet the social expectations, that might naturally lead to unexpected reactions from the people you are interacting with. Maybe it’s their fault, maybe it’s some third party’s fault, maybe it’s your fault – doesn’t really matter. All that matters is whether the relevant information was effectively conveyed, and whether the person who is evaluating the file has positive or negative feelings as a result.
One thing I’ve seen fairly often–not from marketeers, but from assistant and associate profs–is book reviews that get their own title shoved in under the main publications heading. Then I download them, only to find out they’re reviews.
Don’t do that. Even when it’s in a fancy journal. Especially then.
What about 5k-word review essays of several books? I think it’s fine to list them under journal articles so long as it says ‘[review essay]’ after the citation.
I think it would just be cleanest if one separate the following categories at least:
I do also find some people (from fancy or non fancy places) misleadingly mix up these things and it feels padding (up the first category).
I agree with most of the advice in the main post, but I don’t really see what is bad about listing something under “publications” that is (a) actually forthcoming (like, past whatever the very final hoop is), (b) might take many years to come out (as is often true about book chapters) and (c) which you have made a preprint version of available online. This seems comparable to journals posting “online first” versions of articles to me. I think so long as you are clear that it is not yet “out” officially, this is totally fine.
I don’t think anyone upthread was complaining about that! Once it’s accepted, you can list it.
on teaching … for early career people, be very clear about what your role was in the teaching you list. Were you a TA? What were your responsibilities: merely grading assignments, running a tutorial, etc.? Or were you an instructor? One of many or the instructor of record who had to resolve any disputes, submit the grades, etc.? Also, remember teaching is done very differently in North America, the UK, and Europe (I cannot speak for the rest of the world), so describe what you did in two sentences for each course listed. When there is confusion about what you did for readers of your c.v. there is a temptation to just set your file aside.
That sounds like a lot of text to include on a CV. Might the descriptions be best left for the cover letter or teaching portfolio?
You can accomplish this with two or three words; the two sentences suggested by Gorm might be nice, but aren’t strictly necessary.
“sole instructor” vs. “TA: grading” vs. “TA: weekly recitations”, etc., are more than enough to get across what your involvement was, and any of these will be more useful than simply naming the course (without your role relative to it).
TAing is also highly variable.
or maybe I misread the post. I guess it depends what a “sure thing” means. Oftentimes with book chapters there is no formal “this is accepted for publication” from the editor, but you know when the final step is all the same. If you have passed the final step, I think it is fine to list it as a publication.
There is a formal acceptance with book chapters. I just went through this with a contributor to an edited volume. She asked for a letter saying the paper is forthcoming in our edited collection. I said NO – I can only write such a letter when the press has sent me, the editor, the formal acceptance after the clearance review (and production has begun). That is common practice.
I already do what this article recommends in my CV, and I agree with sentiment driving the recommendation. If I was on a search committee, I would feel exactly the same way.
However, I wish to note that in general, trying to know what search committees want is impossible. I have had my job market materials reviewed and re-reviewed by countless advisors (am on the job market), and have received conflicting advice on almost every metric, as have my peers. I also have colleagues on the job market who have had significant success in securing first and second round interviews, and received various job offers, who listed non-academic publications without distinguishing them from peer-reviewed work, as well as those who have listed peer-reviewed articles from disciplines other than philosophy alongside their peer-reviewed philosophy publications.
Search committee members are overloaded and frankly not very careful, presumably as a result of the state of the market itself which means they have impossible numbers of applications to review. Many of us on the job market are playing the odds. We have been advised to; it is probably in our interest to.
In truth, there is no empirical data on what makes a CV (or any other application piece) successful.
We job-marketeers are contorting ourselves into pretzels and going to extreme measures trying to figure out what is wanted.
It does not help that we often hear that there are criteria that guide search committee decision-making that are not explicit or not quite rational.
Maybe this is just a cry of frustration. Or perhaps search committees should note the incentive structure at work here as the primary explanation of what they are seeing. Imagine if the ratio of jobs to job candidates were reversed.
I love this:
And I agree that many of these things are a black box. But while it’s true that we lack sufficient empirical data to say what makes a CV successful, it’s not true that ‘we’ are completely lacking in empirical data. You can look at the CVs of people who have been hired (insofar as they’re publicly available) and see what they have in common. Much of what they have in common may be correlated with the CVs that were turned away, and this we can’t know for sure (and indeed, no one can – no one is studying this). In my experience of looking at CVs, though, there are certain norms that competitive CVs follow.
None of these have much to do with formatting and listing of publications.
I’ve also seen CVs with these characteristics for people going into tenure-track roles flout the norms that are being promoted in this post. FWIW, I don’t think the effort that some put into their CVs will make much difference at all in getting them shortlisted unless they’ve published one or more things in a top journal.
“FWIW, I don’t think the effort that some put into their CVs will make much difference at all in getting them shortlisted unless they’ve published one or more things in a top journal.”
In my experience, this is right. I can’t speak for the processes at the most prestigious departments, but I can tell you that I’ve never heard any complaints about CV formatting from colleagues in the middle of a hiring season.
*Of course* if you present your CV in a way that is very likely to *deceive* someone reading it, that’s bad. So the rule is: be completely clear about what it is you are listing in there. For example, some are saying that journal publications should be distinguished from those in edited volumes. Fine, so be sure to include the book’s information (editors, publisher) next to the title of your publication! If you do so, no one who is paying any attention is going to mistake it for a journal article. Should we distinguish reviews from standard journal articles? Probably in most cases. If it’s a straightforward review and it has “review of” in the title, then no one is going to be deceived. If it’s an article-length review that you feel shouldn’t be reduced to the status of a short standard review, then maybe write next to it “article-length review” or “critical notice” or whatever is most appropriate for the piece. Is that too clunky? Probably some faculty member or another would have told me so as a graduate student. But guess what? Very few actually care about this and, like you say, it isn’t going to make or break you in a hiring process as long as there isn’t something seriously misleading going on.
Just be clear and you’ll be fine.
Thanks for answering questions I’ve been too afraid to ask
You absolutely must share your c.v. with your supervisor and get feedback. It is their professional responsibility to help you with this. They need to teach you the norms. And you are entitled to such a service.
I would also note that this is necessary but insufficient. As the comments alone here show, the views of what is acceptable on a CV from professors can be pretty idiosyncratic. A large number of eyes on your CV can be helpful because your own supervisor’s preference might not follow what is actually a largely accepted professional norm. It would be especially good if that group included (1) people from places other than your home institution and (2) people on hiring committees.
This is, of course, true for like a hundred things on the job market.
You should also share it with someone who is not your supervisor, in case your supervisor has idiosyncratic attitudes!
Do not list book reviews as journal articles, and do not title them as anything other than ‘review of….’. I have seen graduate students, job applicants give titles to book reviews so as to (I suspect) make them appear as full-on, original journal articles. If one has written, instead, a critical notice, label and title it accordingly, e.g., ‘A critical note on So and so’s Blah Blah.’
Some journals do have you title the review. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone giving it a title on the sly, but I have seen my fair share of reviews that appeared in Analysis, Mind, and PhilReview included alongside proper articles. Which, no!
Yes, quite common with Ethics discussion pieces, too. There is nothing in their title to indicate they are a discussion. but the journal’s peer review process is much lighter than for its normal articles, among other things that make them less impressive. It’s still a massive achievement ot have one, so don’t undermine yourself by listing it as an article and annoying someone when they discover it’s not.
Just to be clear: If a paper is a discussion piece (like in Ethics, or like in JESP), do we need to mark it as such? I’ve been told to include these under “Publications,” but there’s no standard for distinguishing them from standard journal articles.
My two cents is: at least in a formal CV, add a label like (commentary).
Exception: sometimes, a response article is long and careful enough to be standalone, and in those cases I think labeling it (commentary) would mislead one to think it’s a shorter piece. So, I would not add the label to standalone-length papers. Someone else would; that’s where I reckon the window of what’s acceptable is wider.
These concerns could largely be addressed if one’s CV listed this under “Research” instead of a heading called “Publications.” And then people could list publications there, as well as a separate list of stuff that is R&R’d, or under submission, or invited for a book chapter, or whatever, since those are also research.
One expects however that search committee members would find a way to complain loudly about that practice too, because they might not read the headings carefully (because who actually pays attention to those?), and get confused and then blame the applicants for trying to get a leg up… I’ve seen on this blog, over the past decade, faculty complain that job applicants shouldn’t be using their dept’s letterhead for their cover letters even if they work there as a postdoc or VAP; that they shouldn’t list published papers that are not yet fully published but are ‘forthcoming’ (even though many journal articles, even at top journals, lay stuck in ‘early/first view’ for over a year which is basically still a forthcoming paper); that they should distinguish things peer-reviewed vs. anonymously peer-reviewed (not always equivalent to ‘peer-reviewed‘) vs. invited, whether it’s publications or conference presentations… And now on this thread I see people complaining about Cambridge Elements books being listed the wrong way, or about not even being proper books; or about shorter-discussion length articles not listing page numbers when they are still forthcoming. Sheesh.
Plenty of what’s been said here is good advice as best practices, especially about not representing oneself as having published what they haven’t yet published.
However, some of the recommendations, especially in the comments section, are a little tedious.
The only reason fine-grained distinctions between various (actually published) publications need to be recognized is for hiring or promotion purposes. But those doing the evaluation for hiring or promoting are (and should be) looking closely enough at the candidate’s work to distinguish these things.
Moreover, the categories are awfully fuzzy. Some book reviews are 1,000 words, for example, and don’t represent significant contributions. Some ‘book reviews’ are 5000+ words and can be extremely valuable. The same goes for so-called ‘reply’ pieces and handbook articles. And we all know mediocre work in top journals and fantastic work buried in obscure invited volumes.
Given the significant variation in format and venue and thus the need for case-by-case evaluation anyway, some of the table-pounding around proper categorization on one’s CV reads to me like needless bean-counting/credit-grubbing.
Call me old-fashioned, but I – and most philosophers I know – care about the quality of the work. We can all tell when something is a short, epicyclical reply piece or a 1,000 word book review – even in a fancy venue – without someone marking that for us. And no one I know thinks less of anybody for having categorized a particular piece differently than we would. You’re just less likely to be hired/promoted if you only have 1,000 word book reviews to your name.
The point about the book reviews is that you have to read the article to discover it’s a review. So of a candidate has a handful of pubs and has mixed in a PhilReview book review, it looks like they have a PhilReview article. That may well help push them through rounds of the process where nobody has the time to read anything.
For my part, I haven’t seen marketeers doing it, only assistants and associates. I get excited because there’s a cool new paper–only to discover it’s a review of the same old book. Reviews are fine and important, but they’re just not the same as articles, even when they’re long. And they aren’t held to the same standard.
Agreed on this problem seemingly less common than some here would seem to imply.
Perhaps we our job search processes are very different, but it takes only a couple of clicks to discover the ‘Phil Review’ book review is a short piece. No one is moving on because it.
Also I’m not so sure about the ‘same standard’ claim. Sometimes the longer book reviews are of the same ‘standard’ of quality. They just haven’t been pushed through the same ‘standard’ of process. But given the vast variation in reviewer quality that we’re all woefully accustomed to and the variation in quality of papers published at even the top journals, it’s not obvious there is a single ‘standard’ of process all papers meet before publication.
Agreed. Not only can some reviews be longer and highly valuable, as you already pointed out, but some are basically standalone pieces. There are 10,000-word reviews that, through well-argued critique, put forth original arguments. In some cases the standard of process is not as high as it would be for original pieces, but in other cases I think there is still an external peer review process involved.
So, seeing “Review of…” in the title should not automatically make one discount its value.
Yes, it’s a few clicks away, but I doubt any of us are reading the publications of candidates not at least on the long list.
I do look at publications closely enough to distinguishing these things before proposing that someone belongs on the long list. And I do look at everyone on the long list. My colleagues on the search committee do this as well.
I appreciate, however, that I may be in a comparatively privileged position. Job searches are difficult slogs for a committee no matter what, but I could believe that aspects of my job and institution make this sort of review doable where it wouldn’t be elsewhere.
To the extent that’s true, I think norms around publication categories should be seen as justified by lowering the burden on especially overworked evaluators. And if that’s right, I’d hope we would default to viewing those who violate these norms not as dishonest about their merit – which seemed to be the implication of some – but as uninformed about how difficult working conditions can be for evaluators.
I am curious what others think about this one. It strikes me as a clear don’t, but I am might be “old man yells at sky” here.
Don’t list as your specialty (or even a competence) every single field that your dissertation or some publication barely touches. I have seen many young philosophers whose AOS/AOC on PhilPapers or on their CV reads like this (forgive the slight exaggeration here):
Ethics, Applied Ethics, Philosophy of AI, Philosophy of Science, Decision Theory, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Law, Metaphysics, Kant, Philosophy of Psychology, Moral Psychology
And then I see that they have like one or two publications that touch on some of these, and their dissertation topic seems like the sort of thing that might invoke all of these. Usually, they haven’t even actually taught most of these subjects.
Is this becoming more common? Does anyone else find this annoying? I worry that I am falling into that old person trap of thinking that the next generation doesn’t know how to do things correctly.
This is one of the few places I was given unambiguous advice. I have no opinion on the advice itself. I’m most interested in just hearing what people think and have heard themselves.
What I was told with these was:
If you’re listing an AOS, you should have published in that subfield and be prepared to teach a graduate seminar on it.
If you’re listing an AOC, you should, at minimum, have a prepared upper-division course on that subfield already (if not already taught it).
I agree with the spirit of this advice, but it’s _too_ restrictive w.r.t. people finishing up grad school who are on the market for the first time and may not have many (or any) publications and only minimal teaching experience with intro or critical thinking. I’d state like this: for new and early career people, the AOS is the field your dissertation primarily falls under, and _maybe_ a related field that your diss borders on or crosses into. The AOCs are areas you did a lot of grad course work on but didn’t end up writing your diss about, or are peripherally related to the diss such that you could easily prep a 200-level course on it. 10 or 15 years later, your AOS and AOC might be longer lists, but if you’re just finishing grad school, you do not have 3 AOSs and 5 AOCs.
I was also given this advice. I don’t dislike it as a starting point, but it admits of too many exceptions.
I think the real issue is that AOS/AOC is an exercise in branding. When someone lists a million AOSs, they’ve failed to create a public identity about the type of philosopher they are.
So I would say: how do you want to be known? Do you want to be known as the metaphysics guy/gal? Then list it as your AOS. Do you want to be known as the guy/gal the metaphysis guy/gal shares their drafts with? Then list it as your AOC.
Thinking about it in terms of branding better coheres with the fact that AOSs/AOCs don’t expand endlessly as your career advances. Sure, maybe you add social philosophy after a few years of working in that area. But that’s not necessarily because you’ve published in that area and are qualified to teach graduate seminars. It’s because you’ve become the social philosophy guy/gal.
‘Thinking about it in terms of branding better coheres with the fact that AOSs/AOCs don’t expand endlessly as your career advances.’
Speak for yourself Peter! I started out as a meta-ethicist but now have publications – yes, actual publications, some of them well-cited – on metaphysics, the philosophy of maths, the philosophy of science, philosophy and literature, (that’s philosophy and literature rather than of literature), the philosophy of language, the philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy (Hume, Plato,Bertrand Russell), the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Many of the biggest names in 20th and 21st century philosophy are or were similarly wide-ranging – Bertrand Russell, Bill Lycan, Frank Jackson, David Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Stephen Stich, Martha Nussbaum and Alvin Goldman and Susan Haack for instance. The idea that a philosopher should settle into a groove with just one or two areas of specialisation and that this should be their ‘brand’ strikes me as a recipe for dull over-specialised philosophy and the fact that this idea is widely shared helps to explain why so much philosophy nowadays really isn’t worth reading.
That said, I don’t think that young philosophers should boast about Areas of Specialisation in which they have not published or which are not the subjects of their dissertations. The rule is ‘Don’t lie and don’t exaggerate ‘ (for instance by listing ‘under reviews’ as publications) a) because it is dishonest (and not just ignorant) and b) because it wastes the time of search committees who have to double check cvs, sorting the wheat of genuine achievement from the chaff of puffery and aspiration. Search committees resent being deceived to especially if the deceptions waste their time. Remember, search committees are (quite sensibly ) LOOKING for reasons to eliminate people so don’t give them a reason to eliminate you by padding out your cv with non-achievements.
Sorry, I think you may have misread what I wrote. No where did I say that philosophers shouldn’t publish on a wide range of topics. “AOS/AOC” is a label you put onto yourself as a way of communicating what kind of philosopher you are. It is not a pure reflection of the areas you have published in. Or, at least that was what I was suggesting in my post.
An observation from my own experience…
I was on the market about ten years ago with a PhD from a non-leiter-ranked program, with a handful of publications.
Some of the advice I got was exactly opposite of that presented here. For instance, I originally had my publications listed under “journal articles”, “invited book chapters”, and “abstracts” (I worked primarily in logic at the time and John Corcoran encouraged me to publish some abstracts in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic as a way to start getting used to the process of publishing). When I workshopped my CV with my program, I was told to absolutely collapse those distinctions down to one category of “publications”. And, I was told nobody would ever do otherwise.
Now, I have no opinions on this particular debate. My concern is that, given states of affairs like this, why are people on search committees making so much meaning out of violations of their individual pet-peeves? Dishonesty is dishonesty and I think we can sniff that out in lots of views. But, this idea that we can read so much off of individual CV decisions seems wild to me. Especially since, at my 4-year public institution where I had my TT job, any search committee was going to be multi-disciplinary with people coming from backgrounds with significantly varying CV norms.
But why on Earth would you list a paper under review as a publication, to make the reviewer aware who’s paper is it by a few clicks?
Is it acceptable to list an invited chapter that hasn’t yet been accepted? I currently have two headings, “Peer-Reviewed Publications” and “Invited Submissions.” The latter is intended to be broad enough to include both a chapter that’s been invited but not yet accepted; and a publication, which isn’t properly philosophical, which was invited for a special issue of a bioethics journal.
Nope. It may still get rejected. It’s work in progress.
What about an R&R? Can one say where it’s gotten an R&R at? I’ve seen it done often. Presumably this does give job committees some valuable info.
No.
I’ve been on multiple hiring committees, and I’d find this information on a CV useful. It might be odd to put on e.g., the version of your CV that you have on your website. But if you have an R&R when you’re applying for a job, I’d go ahead and put that information on your CV (just being sure to label it clearly).
Yes, definitely put this for an application (not public CVs). It’s very much to your advantage. If you’ve gotten and R&R at a good journal, there’s a decent chance you may get published there, and that good info for committees to have.
Maybe more of a tip then a do/don’t, but something that I picked up through osmosis: For forthcoming papers, I make a distinction between in press papers and online first papers like:
John Doe (2025). “Why I am Not a Gym Leader”, Poke Review, In press
John Doe (2024). “Fairy-type Internalism”, Arceus, Available Online, https://doi:….
I had to adopt this practice because, partly, I couldn’t list a paper as “published” until it had a volume/issue number for some project application, but I still find it useful enough. Of course, it may vary by subfield/region, etc.
Correction:
John Doe (forthcoming). “Why I am Not a Gym Leader”, Poke Review, In press
John Doe (forthcoming). “Fairy-type Internalism”, Arceus, Available Online, https://doi:….
I have also been unsure about invited papers. Take, for example, a book symposium in a journal (a collection of papers with a reply from the author). Say your paper was invited but is still subjected to an anonymous review process where rejection is a possibility. Would it be improper to list this among other journal articles? In other words, does the fact that it was invited override the fact it was refereed, thus deserving a separate CV category? Are there other factors (e.g., length of the article) to consider?
I have seen people make various distinctions, e.g. ‘invited, peer-reviewed’, but I wouldn’t go to these lengths on your CV (or else you could end up with an awful lot of publication sub-sections).
I’d just list it as peer-reviewed (since it was). Saying that doesn’t preclude it being invited, but I don’t think you need to declare that.
Although I am not in this position myself, I have seen a few people who have had papers accepted to (for example) WINE, MadMeta, Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop, or some other conference where that conference always or almost always publishes all papers in the proceedings (or a special issue). They then list the paper on their CV as “provisionally forthcoming”. Is that appropriate to do?
I suppose it depends on the exact status at the time. I’d say ‘provisionally forthcoming’ may be an exaggeration, because that sounds like a conditional acceptance. If there’s still some further selection, between conference and publication, then I’d say ‘under review’ would be better. But you can note that it was from the workshop and for a special issue.
Here are a few random bits of advice after 20 years of job experience as a prof in three different countries: