Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) published a post yesterday entitled, 'How to Publish a Journal Article in Philosophy: Advice for Graduate Students and New Assistant Professors.' While I think the post is very helpful in a variety of ways–particularly in terms of walking grad students through the whole publishing process–I'd like to explore an alternative perspective.
Schwitzgebel begins his post (quite rightly, I think) noting that his advice is directed at graduate students interested in jobs at research institutions (i.e. R1's). He writes:
Should You Try to Publish as a Graduate Student?
Yes, if you are seeking a job where hiring will be determined primarily on research promise, and if you can do so without excessively hindering progress toward your degree.
Speaking to this audience, Schwitzgebel's first major piece of advice is this:
Generally speaking, you'll want your first publication to be on something so narrow that you are among the five top experts in the world on that topic.
He then advocates extending this same strategy to several follow-up papers, which he calls the 'tripod theory of building expertise':
Publish three papers on narrow but related topics. These serve as a tripod establishing your expertise in the broader subarea to which they belong.
I suspect this probably is very good advice for graduate students interested in pursuing R1 jobs (and who are on a legitimate track to this end–see below), and I've seen some people at these kinds of institutions chime in to this effect. But this raises a few further questions:
- Is it a good publishing strategy for graduate students in general?
- Is it a good publishing strategy for graduate students not on a path to an R1 position?
- Is it a good publishing strategy for Assistant Professors?
Let me begin by raising one principled concern that I have about (1). My concern here, to echo a concern that I have heard quite a few people raise about our profession more generally, is that this kind of advice runs the risk of further inculcating in grad students an attitude that professional philosophy is a 'game' that, 'if you play it right', might advance your career. I don't think this is Schwitzgebel's intent or how he pursues philosophy. I just think that if our primary focus is on 'career strategy', certain things may be lost. For notice what isn't prioritized in the advice: following your authentic philosophical interests where they lead or pursuing broad, ambitious projects that you may think are more interesting and philosophically important. Instead, the advice is to find something narrow that you can become a recognized expert at, such that it will help you get a job and become recognized by your peers. Now, to be clear, I think there is something quite valuable about giving people sound advice to this effect. Jobs are scarce, and people have legitimate reasons to want to get jobs and advance in their careers. I just think it's worth recognizing that there can be costs to inculcating attitudes of 'winning the academic game' in early-career people. Is that what we got into this for to begin with? I didn't. I got into philosophy because I wanted to follow my interests wherever they led and answer the kinds of philosophical questions that I am passionate about and think are genuinely important.
This brings me to a secondary concern I have about (1), which is more instrumental in nature: namely, that even if Schwitzgebel's advice is 'sound strategy' for getting an R1 job (and my sense is that it probably is), it could still not be the best overall strategy for students to pursue. Here, in brief, is why. When I was in graduate school and in my first Visiting Assistant Professor position (at a research school), I was given similar advice: find something really narrow to write on, etc. The only problem was that, as 'sound' as this advice may have been, trying to follow it completely destroyed my joy for philosophy. I was never the kind of philosopher who enjoyed working on really narrow issues, nor I think is it where my talents lie. I've always been a 'big picture' / systematizing kind of philosopher, as well as the kind of person who thinks there are many ways to do good philosophy (looking at the history of philosophy in particular has always suggested to me that the philosophical advancement is spurred on both by 'big picture' and narrow work, and that people who are good at one kind of thing aren't always the best at the other). In any case, to the extent that I tried to follow the 'write on something narrow' advice, I not only got nowhere in terms of publishing; I also gradually came to hate philosophy, as I felt like I was a square peg trying to force myself into a round hole, as it were. It was only once I began following my own interests and priorities where they led that I began to have any success publishing or, to that extent, on the job market.
This brings me to question (2). Schwitzgebel, again, quite rightly notes that his advice is directed at students interested in securing a job at research-focused institutions. But what about people looking for jobs at other institutions? Here, he writes:
If you're aiming for schools that hire primarily based on teaching, effort spent on polishing publications rather than on improving your teaching profile (e.g., by teaching more courses and teaching them better) might be counterproductive.
I don't think this is right. A number of years ago over the course of several years, I informally collected data on who got jobs at different types of institutions. One of the more surprising things I found–which coheres very well with my experience hiring at a 'teaching school'–was that even at teaching schools, publications seemed to be the best predictors of who got hired. 'Teaching schools' really aren't just about teaching. We care about publishing quite a bit actually. We just don't care about them in the same way as people at R1's. We don't care nearly as much about things like journal rankings or whether you're one of the biggest experts in your area (indeed, these kinds of things may even make us think you're a better candidate for an R1 job). What do we care about? In my experience, it's pretty simple: we care about (1) whether you publish enough to get tenure, and (2) whether your research seems interesting, both to us and our students. But, in that case, what publishing strategy is best? Well, it's not clear–but I can say this: publishing simply on what interested me the most (rather than focusing on a 'narrow area') seems to have been a big part of what enabled me to publish a lot early in my career (since, finally, I was actually excited about what I was working on! As a side note, this has been one of the more unexpectedly wonderful things about working at a non-R1 institution: I think I've felt far more free to pursue my authentic philosophical interests than I ever felt in a highly-competitive R1 environment. It made philosophy fun again!). And publishing a lot very much did seem to help me on the market: every year I published more, I got more interviews, etc.
In short, Schwitzgebel's advice may very much be spot on as a strategy for getting a job at an R1. However, if that's not your priority, then it may make sense to pursue a very different approach. Finally, on that note, it is probably worth remembering that quite a lot of graduate students may want an R1 job but not be on a very good path to one. As I noted several years ago, graduate students in lower-ranked programs in the Leiter report often seem to seek R1 jobs but have a great deal of trouble because they are competing against students from top-ranked programs. R1 jobs are comparatively rare and the most difficult jobs to get, and some data Helen collected coheres with the hypothesis that it is very hard to get highly ranked R1 jobs from lower-ranked programs. So, if you're coming out of a lower-ranked program, tying your publishing strategy to that end may well be a terrible mistake.
Anyway, none of this is to say that Schwitzgebel's advice is poor advice. Again, to be clear, I think it is probably very good advice…for certain students for certain purposes. I just wanted to write this post as a kind of counterbalance, to get readers to consider how very different publishing strategies could be better for different kinds of students (and Assistant Professors) in different situations with different priorities!
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