The Philosophers' Cocoon

A safe and supportive forum for philosophers.

Owned & Moderated by Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa)

Contact: marvan@ut.edu

Blog mission & moderation policy

IMPORTANT NOTE on how to ensure anonymity in commenting
Job-Market Reporting Thread (2025-26)
Job-Market Discussion Thread (2025-26)

recent posts

about

The ‘publishing arms race’ in grad school vs. in a TT job?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

one of my least favorite parts of grad school was participating in the publication "arms race." I know it's not a novel observation, but it seems that in my future institution, in order to get tenure, I have to simply continue to participate. One plus is that this race will be a bit longer as I'll have job stability (and better pay and benefits) during that time. Can those with experience on both sides tell me what, for them, the difference between these publishing arms races has been?

I empathize, and this is a fair question! In my experience, a lot depends on the kind of institution you are at and how high the publication expectations are.

But in any case, my sense is that the biggest differences are these: you have a lot more to do in a full-time job (full-time teaching, mentoring, service) than in grad school, combined with a very limited amount of time (5 years) to publish everything you need to before you come up for tenure. This means that if you have to publish a lot (in selective journals) to get tenure, you need to get a lot of good papers finished and out while in a full-time job, and in turn published. This can be hard given all of the other stuff you have to do, and with journal wait times and rejection rates, it can be really stressful, particularly as you get closer to tenure review.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

Posted in

14 responses to “The ‘publishing arms race’ in grad school vs. in a TT job?”

  1. academic migrant

    Try co-authoring insofar as your institution doesn’t disvalue co-authorship. Even if it divides the value of the output with the number of co-authors, it may be still worth it because of the time you save if you have excellent co-authors. (They can do their part of the lit review for you, just mentioning one of the benefits.) And if you’re lucky enough, your institution might not be bothered with the number of co-authors and/or the order of the authors.

    Reply
  2. sahpa

    It is also worth mentioning that the arms race is likely to be much accelerated. In many grad programs in philosophy, for example, someone publishing an article a year (from, say, year 3 onward) will be quite productive; but that won’t cut the mustard for tenure at research-focused institutions.
    I am admittedly cynical about academia these days (just washed out of yet another TT job market cycle), but my sense is that, if you have serious problems with the publication arms race as it exists in grad school, the tenure track will be a rude awakening.

    Reply
  3. Trevor Hedberg

    While it is true that you have fewer responsibilities in graduate school compared to most jobs you will have afterward, you will also be much more skilled once you complete graduate school relative to when you start and will be able to draw on material from your dissertation to develop publications. Assuming your dissertation is good and on a worthwhile topic, this should sustain your for a few years even if you don’t generate any new ideas.
    How the publication expectations compare to what you did in graduate school will depend on the position (mostly, teaching-focused jobs will have lower expectations for scholarship) and on how much you had to do in graduate school to be competitive on the job market. I felt I had to publish a lot early on because I came from an unranked program, so the requirements / expectations in my current post are, in my view, actually lower than what I was producing during my last few years of graduate school.

    Reply
  4. Michel

    It was hard for me to publish as a grad student. It was hard as a postdoc on a tight timeline. Now it’s pretty easy. The more you do it, the more familiar you become with the process, and the easier it gets.
    I think it’s a lot easier if you enjoy the process. For my part, the reason I enjoy the process is because I don’t see myself as in any kind of race (to be fair, I have a permanent if somewhat unstable NTT job with no research expectations). Instead, I see myself as part of a conversation with the rest of my subfield, many/most of whom I know fairly well. I know them well because I’ve seen them and spent time with them at conference after conference ever since I was a PhD student. I write to engage with their work, and in the hope that they’ll engage with mine. They’re kind enough to celebrate my successes, and I, in turn, celebrate theirs.

    Reply
  5. Bill Vanderburgh

    OP is right that there is more time to earn tenure. But an important point is that since it is so difficult to get a publication (5-10% acceptance rates in many good journals!) and the review time can be very long (a year from initial submission to final acceptance is still not uncommon), you CANNOT rely on trying to get the last few pubs in your last year of the tenure clock. Front load your effort, so that you know you have the right number by the end of the tenure period. My recommendation to grad students is to get the 2-3 pubs on the cv before going on the job market, then keep working on stuff but don’t publish it till you get a tenure track job. That way you’ll be able to get a few pubs quickly and give yourself some breathing room. (Generally, papers published before starting a tenure-track job won’t count much, if at all, towards tenure. But no one keeps tabs on when you first wrote them! With the caveat below.)
    Given OP’s distaste for publishing (if I’m reading that right), they should definitely be aiming for a teaching-focused position rather than a research-focused one, where the tenure expectation might be 3-4 papers instead of 5-7 (in tougher journals).
    Remember, too, that departments are looking for you to establish an independent research program beyond the dissertation. You can build on the diss, but don’t plan just to publish its ideas and expect that to be a sufficient record in most places. This may have implications for who you co-author with, too (i.e., not more than one or two papers with your PhD supervisor).

    Reply
  6. Publish now!

    Bill Vanderburgh, I get why you say don’t publish until you get a TT job. But I think this is bad advice. First, if you sit on publishable papers, you run the risk of the literature moving on without you or getting scooped. Second, getting a TT job is no simple matter and can take years. It’s highly inadvisable to withhold publications for years on end. That would look awful on a CV. Third, one doesn’t just ‘publish’. It can take years to publish a single paper in a good journal, especially if there are multiple rounds of reviews followed by a rejection. You should be publishing everything you’ve got once it’s ready. This, I think, is or ought to be a self-replicating process. The more you publish, the more publishable ideas you’ll have, the more experience you’ll get, the easier publishing will become, etc.
    This advice to hold off on publishing only makes sense, I think, in a world where it is likely one is to land a TT job relatively quickly after finishing the PhD.

    Reply
  7. sahpa

    Publish now! wrote: “You should be publishing everything you’ve got once it’s ready. This, I think, is or ought to be a self-replicating process. The more you publish, the more publishable ideas you’ll have, the more experience you’ll get, the easier publishing will become, etc.”
    Of course this advice does not scale, since ‘publish everything you’ve got once it’s ready’ is exactly what fuels the arms race and makes publishing worse/harder for everyone. As with most advice for competitive activities, it’s only good if it is given out+followed selectively – thereby imparting competitive advantage on the (privileged) few.
    (This point applies mutatis mutandis to a lot of the advice given on the Cocoon. I think this fact ought to be acknowledged more.)

    Reply
  8. Gabe Gottlieb

    What’s expected for tenure seems to vary quite a bit from school to school, but this is only anecdotal. A lot of anxiety stems from a lack of knowledge or access to the relevant information. I am a bit surprised there is not more transparency about publication requirements or tenure requirements from departments or a push, perhaps by the APA or the blogs, to make that information more readily available (perhaps some of it is public and I’m just not aware of it) Granted, there are tons of universities and colleges but having a representative sample could be quite useful for a number of reasons, including better informing people in graduate school and on the market about what to expect. Since departments change their requirements it would also be useful to keep track of changing norms and expectations in the discipline. Finally, particularly for graduate programs, it might give some insight into the faculty and internal expectations of faculty in such programs. I’m not sure there are good reasons for not making this info public but maybe I’m missing something obvious.

    Reply
  9. Assistant Professor

    The OP asks what has been different on various sides of this “arms race.” One thing in the post-grad school era of publishing (but pre-tenure) for me has been that while I have less time overall due to other job requirements, I have more latitude in what kinds of publications I want to work on. In grad school typically the options are to spin a seminar paper (that you may or may not care about) into a publication or try to peel off parts of the dissertation, but dissertation chapters don’t always work well as standalone essays. The structures of grad student writing are just not great for publications and writing other things can be a distraction from the stuff you have to get done (course work, dissertation).
    Now I can write things that I intend to publish as standalone papers, often with a particular journal in mind, and it makes publishing somewhat easier (not easy, but easier). I also only write stuff I want to write (it isn’t assigned to me!) and I enjoy co-authoring as mentioned above, which isn’t available in those grad school modes of writing a seminar paper or dissertation.
    Finally, on the discussion about holding back potential publications – I think this is a savvy move once you have a job in hand. If you know you’ll be starting a position in August, then send a bunch of your stuff out before the job starts. Starting up a new job is not a great time to be producing new work so having things under review in that time can be helpful and those pubs will count toward promotion. But I also agree that holding them back indefinitely until one gets a permanent job is likely not going to work to get that permanent job.
    Good luck!

    Reply
  10. Publish now!

    Sahpa,
    Interesting point. I guess I just disagree. The solution to the arms race shouldn’t be a ‘levelling down’ solution (i.e., telling people to stop or avoid publishing, be more selective, sit on publishable papers, etc.). Rather, if more people publishing makes publishing more difficult, then there ought to be systematic solutions among publishers/journals to alleviate this (create more journals, find solutions to lack of reviewers, speed of reviewing time, etc.). I just can’t see how it ever makes sense to withhold sending a good paper to a journal, especially if the rationale for doing so is to help alleviate the publishing arms race. You’re just shooting yourself in the foot then, since no one else is going to take that approach.

    Reply
  11. academic migrant

    “not more than one or two papers with your PhD supervisor”
    The advice I received was that one should not publish with one’s supervisor before having a few decent solo pubs. In the stage where one only has pubs with one’s supervisor, even if untrue, people will attribute the merit to the supervisor and the demerit to the student. (Someone not from philosophy has also suggested to me that I should only co-author with people of similar skin colour for very similar reasons.)
    And it would also be decent to co-author with more than one co-author. This would show that you can co-author with different people. Sometimes the hiring institution has people looking for co-authors.

    Reply
  12. No longer a race

    Once you’re in a TT job, I don’t think it makes so much sense to view it as a race. You’re not competing with others in the same way you were competing for positions on the job market. You don’t need to get one more publication than your peers. You need to get the minimum number of publications (plus one or two as a buffer) required for tenure at your department. This of course is a simplification, but this has been my experience at three different R1s.

    Reply
  13. No racer

    No longer a race
    Thank you for your measured and insightful remarks – hopefully others will listen. Life is an arms race if you approach it that way. But at one point a person needs to have some perspective, and set their own goals. A full time TT job lets one do that. Young scholars who manage to get TT jobs should (i) figure out what they need to get tenure, and (ii) then start placing their papers in better venues so they are more likely to get read. And (iii) most importantly take on interesting work, that is research that you find interesting.

    Reply
  14. placement person

    People seem to be repeatedly invoking something that isn’t true in this thread. I’ve been doing placement for many years and have also paid close attention to the job market more generally. It’s just not true that, after a certain point, more publications are more likely to get you a job. I think the number past which that is true is something in the 1-3 range (if you are a grad student; maybe more if you are a postdoc, vap, etc., but what matters more there is that your pace is continuous–so if you published nothing in grad school and 2 papers as a postdoc, you’re probably fine). I think some mix of Bill and Assistant Professor’s advice is right–definitely hold stuff back if you have a job lined up, but still be savvy about not publishing too much too early regardless, and don’t just keep throwing stuff out there. Both in job market candidacy and in tenure trajectory matters a lot. It’s going to look bad if you publish a ton in grad school and then have a long gap on your CV.
    I don’t think anyone should have to publish in grad school, so I guess I agree that there is a bit of an arms race (since I do think the difference between publishing and not publishing is enormous on the market), but one thing all of you can do to help it is to not keep talking about it as thought it really is about piling up publications, which no one needs to do to get a job.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Gabe GottliebCancel reply

Discover more from The Philosophers' Cocoon

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading