A reader writes in:
I’m a relatively new academic, and I’m only now in a position to be concerned with my publication record (I work at a teaching institution with virtually no research requirements for tenure). I’m trying to understand the exact role conference presentations play in the pipeline of research and publication.
Is it really necessary to present a paper at a conference before submitting it to a journal? If a person just submitted directly to a journal without having previously presented it at a conference, is that kind of “cheating” professionally speaking? I understand that conferences will involve getting valuable feedback, but is that not also true of peer review notes from a journal (even if the paper is ultimately rejected)? Is conference participation just a simpler way of getting a line on the CV since journal pubs take a while? Are they primarily for the purpose of networking? Part of my concern is that attending conferences would be rather taxing on my ability to perform my job duties (given that I have a huge teaching load [6/6] and no research requirements to speak of, let alone that I would have to fund those trips out of pocket); so I’m wondering if the benefits outweigh the costs.
This is a good query. I suspect, as with most things like this, that there may be a lot of disagreement. Allow me to share a few thoughts of my own, and then open things up for discussion.
In the past, I've heard some say that it's irresponsible to send a paper to a journal without first getting conference feedback–or, failing that, feedback from outside readers (an obvious alternative to individuals, like this reader, who may be severely burdened by conference travel). One real problem here, however, is that for some people even that isn't very feasible. I know this from experience. When I was a graduate student at Arizona and then in my first job at UBC, getting feedback wasn't difficult: I had other grad students, faculty, and so on, who were easy to approach and generally willing to read and comment on things. However, when I moved to a much smaller department in Tampa, I found myself in a department with only two other full-time faculty members, neither of whom worked in areas remotely close to mine (Aesthetics and Asian philosophy). As a shy, introverted person who was never very good at approaching people, getting feedback on work proved profoundly difficult. I tried approaching people online, but they were either usually too busy or took forever to read anything. And, while I sent stuff to conferences, my travel funding was quite limited. Because I desperately needed to publish (to, first, get a tenure track job and then eventually get tenure), I ended up often–basically out of necessity–simply drafting things up and sending them to journals straightaway. In some cases, I learned through the review process that the paper was unpublishable and gave up on it. However, in other cases, I got revise-and-resubmits or outright acceptances. Finally, I've heard there are other people (including some very well-established people) who take this approach as well.
Here's why I tell this whole story. I am sure there are some readers out there, again, who think that simply drafting things up and sending them out to journals for review is irresponsible, thinking this practice problematically burdens the entire review system with too much work, too much of which is bad and unpublishable. In all honesty, I have some real sympathy with this position. As a referee, I've read and written reviews of papers that I think probably had no business being submitted to a journal in the first place. Nevertheless, as my above story indicates, sometimes people really have no better option. For better or (almost certainly) worse, we live and work in a 'publish or perish' environment. The publication process itself is both long (3-12 months for review) and uncertain (90%+ rejection rates). When someone needs to publish consistently (and publish now) to get a job or tenure, I think people are going to do what they have to, even if that means sending stuff out without first presenting it at conferences or getting much in the way of outside feedback. Is this ideal? Of course not. Very little about academia (or life for that matter) is ideal. Consequently, myself, I don't blame people who don't have a better option. When I review a paper for a journal that I think shouldn't have been submitted, I try to bear in mind that it could have been submitted by someone who is in the same kind of desperate situation I was a few years back. What I do think, though, is that those who do have the ability to get feedback from conferences and outsiders should try to do so–and indeed, that we all should, to the extent we can. But, as these remarks indicate, I think the extent to which any person can afford to do this is generally going to be a highly contextualized matter that only they can really figure out (hopefully with integrity) given their career situation.
So, to make a long story short, I guess I would say to the reader who wrote in: "Given that you mentioned you don't really face any real research requirements for tenure but conferences are cost and time-prohibitive in your situation, I don't think conference presentations are necessary. As an alternative, try instead to get feedback in another way before submitting things–for instance, by reaching out to people by email, or doing a "feedback session" on academia.edu or philpapers, etc. If, after trying that, you're still not able to get much feedback, you've done your best: you have a right as a credentialed academic to send your work to a journal to see what reviewers think!"
But these are just some quick thoughts off the top of my head. What are yours?
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