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Reforming Refereeing (guest post by Aaron Garrett)
The following is a guest post* by Aaron Garrett, associate professor of philosophy at Boston University. Professor Garrett recently became editor of the History of Philosophy Quarterly and asked if we could open up a discussion about reforming various aspects of article refereeing. I encourage people to contribute to the discussion and share their experiences and co..
“Sleeping Beauty” Papers in Philosophy (updated)
“Sleeping Beauty” papers “lie dormant for years before experiencing a sudden spike in citations as they are discovered and recognized as important.” A recent article in Nature discussed scientific papers that have slumbered for decades, as well as a way of assigning a “beauty coefficient” to papers.
The coefficient, B, is “a value based on the number of citations..
Journal Editor Resists University “Vetting” of Content
A Northwestern University professor who edits a bioethics magazine has shelved the publication over a dispute with administrators, who demand that public relations staff approve content. Katie Watson, a professor in the university’s Medical Humanities and Bioethics program who edits the journal Atrium, said the demand followed recent controversy over the school’s ce..
Moratorium and New Editors at Mind
Thomas Baldwin (York), the current editor of Mind, writes that the journal will cease accepting new submissions for several months, starting in July, so as to ease the transfer of the editorship to Adrian Moore (Oxford) and Lucy O’Brien (UCL):
At the end of September 2015 the editorship of Mind will move from Thomas Baldwin (York) to Adrian Moore (Oxford) and Luc..
Diversity in Moral and Political Philosophy Journals
Alex Guerrero (U. Penn) looked at four leading journals in moral and political philosophy to see how they have been doing in terms of racial and ethnic diversity over the past decade. Some findings:
- 0.9% of authors 1.6% of editors are racialized as black
- 1.2% of authors and 0% of editors are Latina/Latino
- 4.9% of authors and 4.3% of editors are Asian
- 18.2%..
What Counts As Pre-Publication?
Dale Miller (ODU) noticed that Public Affairs Quarterly has the following “Pre-Publication Policy“:
Public Affairs Quarterly will not publish material that has already appeared elsewhere. This is not at odds with authors sharing their papers with selected individuals whose comments they would welcome or who they wish for other reasons to inform about their work. ..
No One Is Listening
Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities — 82 per cent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. No one ever refers to 32 per cent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 per cent in the natural sciences. If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has..
APA / BPA Journal Surveys
Last year, the American Philosophical Association (APA) and the British Philosophical Association (BPA) teamed up to conduct a survey of philosophy journals, and the results are now in. 43 journals were surveyed on submission and acceptance rates, review process, and the percentages of papers submitted and accepted that were written by women and members of minority ..
Advice on Refereeing Papers
Three professors have published a brief guide to refereeing papers. Though based in business schools, Jonathan Berk (Stanford), Campbell Harvey (Duke), and David Hirshleifer (UC Irvine) have produced a document that provides good general advice for referees across the disciplines.
Some excerpts:
The main job of the referee is not:
1) To help write the paper ..
Plagiarism Policies
In November of last year, Daily Nous hosted a guest post that exposed the extraordinary plagiarism of Iranian philosopher Mahmoud Khatami (follow-ups here and here). One of the articles alleged to be a work of plagiarism was a 2007 article of his in Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy, entitled “On the illuminationist approach to imaginal power: outline of ..
Guarding the Guardians (or Editors) (3 updates)
The reason your paper is listed as ‘editor assigned’ is that I’m going to review it myself.
In the wake of the recent discussion here about the editorial practices at philosophy journals, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (UBC) recounts a story, set about five years ago, in which he submitted a paper to a journal with a policy of double-anonymous reviewing—Philosophic..
Reasons You Rejected a Paper
The discussion of journal practices is continuing, but, at the suggestion of Tom Dougherty, I am posting this as a place to gather “frequent reasons for rejection” of articles. Here is his comment from the other thread:
If many of the papers getting desk-rejected by journals are rejected for common reasons, then I wonder if it might be in everyone’s interests for..
A Closer Look at Philosophy Journal Practices (two updates)
Considering how important the publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals is to a successful career in philosophy, it is expected that curiosity and questions about the practices at philosophy journals would arise. Additionally, lately it seems as if there has been an increase in concerns about unfairness in access to publication opportunities, including insuf..
Confluence, a New Online Philosophy Journal
Confluence: Online Journal of World Philosophies, is a new bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal of comparative philosophy and thought. From its mission statement:
It seeks to explore common spaces and differences between philosophical traditions in a global context. Without postulating cultures as monolithic, homogenous, or segregated wholes, it aspires to address ke..
Deciding which Papers to Referee
Some philosophers receive an excessive number of requests to referee papers. How should they go about deciding which papers to agree to referee?
Of course the paper should be in one’s area, but even that criteria leaves some people with more requests than they could reasonably be expected to fulfill, and so, with a decision about which requests to accept. One mig..
Open Access and Journal-less Publishing
Recently I was asked by the editors of a journal whose mission and scholarship I support and respect to review a book by a scholar I very much admire. In the past, I would have accepted the invitation without a second thought and proceeded to read the book and develop a review. Over the past few years, however, as my work has focused on questions of public scholarsh..
New Open Access Journal
Symposion has been relaunched as an open access, multilingual, quarterly, philosophy-centric interdisciplinary journal. Its first issue in its new format has just been published.
Making Philosophy Journal Statistics Publicly Available
Philipp Blum, one of the co-editors of the journal, dialectica, has a request for other journal editors:
I think it would be very helpful if philosophy journals would make
publicly available much more information on acceptance rates and
submission statistics.
He notes that dialectica has been doing this for 14 years; check out these charts and graphs, which could s..
Should Publishers Pay Referees and Authors?
If academic work is to be commodified and turned into a source of profit for shareholders and for the 1 percent of the publishing world, then we should give up our archaic notions of unpaid craft labor and insist on professional compensation for our expertise, just as doctors, lawyers, and accountants do.
This does not mean we would never referee articles free. Jus..
Must Journal Submissions Conform to Style Guidelines?
An assistant professor writes in with the following query:
Do journal editors ever reject something simply because it doesn’t fit the stated style guidelines? While it is becoming more popular for journals to state that guidelines need only be followed for accepted articles, a good amount of venerable journals still seem to require submissions to fit their guideline..
Free Porn Studies
The inaugural issue of the academic journal Porn Studies is out, and it’s a big one, by which I mean it is a double issue. Not that size matters. The publisher, Taylor & Francis, has made the entire contents free to download, and after a cursory inspection I can report two things my readership probably wants to know: (1) it seems to be entirely SFW, and (2) it seems..
How Should Journals Instruct Referees?
“How, then, can philosophy become more inclusive and less boring?” Over at the Philosopher’s Cocoon, Marcus Arvan suggests that one way might be to have journals give referees different instructions from what they typically do.
Is “Life” Useless?
I have received lots of advice from friends about the blog, including “get a life.” Turns out this is easier said than done, since defining “life” is notoriously tricky. See this post at Scientific American for some of the problems nailing down the concept, and for further discussion, check out this special issue of Synthese.
Thirty Takes on Free Will
You really have no choice but to check out this issue of Methode Journal featuring thirty short interviews with philosophers about free will. It’s a terrific line-up, and each interview is downloadable as its own pdf.
New Journal: Science, Religion, and Culture
A new, peer-reviewed, open-access, interdisciplinary journal, Science, Religion & Culture, has been launched by Smith & Franklin publishing. There are a number of philosophers on the editorial board, including editor-in-chief Gregg D. Caruso (Corning Community College, SUNY), who explains what the new journal is about in this piece.