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In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks
I just got an R&R on my sample. Would it be a good idea to include this at the top of the sample? Or would this be a violation of peer-review practices?
I honestly have no idea. As with many job-market and publishing-related things, I suspect there's likely to be some diversity of views here, though maybe I'm wrong.
What do readers think?
This is the kind of thing I would put on your CV. You can list it in under a works in progress section, followed up ‘revise and resubmit at (journal name).’
In general, I think it’s fine to be explicit about R&R situations in privately circulated job documents, but not anything publicly circulated. Typically, I note these kinds of details in my cover letter, which I always intend for the eyes of search committees only. I imagine that circulating a private version of the writing sample with that information listed would probably be fine, though it would help to note that (e.g., “Revise-and-resubmit at Journal X; please not distribute or cite this version without permission.”) I wouldn’t ever put this on a CV or a document on my personal webpage, though.
Of course, we don’t want to compromise peer review, but the chances of this happening during a search review are fairly low, and we have to puff up our peacock feathers as much as possible so that we can get jobs and survive in — and hopefully critique — this increasingly hostile world.
what doomsday scroller said seems 100% right to me!
Like most things job market related, I’ve received conflicting advice on this issue. In case it’s helpful, here is what I’ve been told.
One piece of advice I’ve received from a placement director is that it’s okay to list something as an R&R, but that one should not list the journal. The justification was that many R&Rs end up not being rejected after revisions, and that it is bad form to claim a journal name until one has received (at least) a conditional acceptance. They seemed to feel very strongly about this.
On the other hand, two other people I’ve chatted with have (who have served on hiring committees) recommended listing the location of an R&R, saying things like “it gives the committee an idea of where you’re trying to publish”.
I second the reasoning of doomsday scroller.
A quote from another post above : “…bad form to claim a journal name until one has received (at least) a conditional acceptance…”
The placement director who is worried about this strikes me as overly worried. When you say where you have an R&R, you’re making a claim about a journal which is straightforwardly true. It is of course not true that you have a publication at that journal or ever will, but these are further claims that are distinct from the R&R claim.
Maybe the worry involves wanting to “hide” if your paper gets rejected at the R&R stage rather than a concern about truth – only ever circulating more vague claims about the status of your under review papers could help with that I guess. But I don’t see much to gain from this.
(Nonetheless it’s good to know that these ideas are out there, thanks to the poster above for sharing it)
I would not write it on the draft itself. A paper that has received an R&R can be listed in the Works in Progress section of the cv with the leading parenthetical remark (“revise and resubmit” revisions in progress) or (revisions in response to “revise and resubmit” complete and re-submitted). It has not been published yet, so don’t list it with published works or folks might get grumpy about dishonesty on the cv. I’m of two minds about listing the journal name: Definitely do not for something that is merely under review, probably okay when it is an R&R. (The governing principle is that a cv is a place to record your achievements, not your hopes.)
I can only say here what my practice was-I did not indicate the paper’s status on the paper itself (I don’t have a principle for that – it just seemed weird). I did indicate it had an R&R complete with journal name under “works in progress” in my CV. My logic was that a) it was true, b) the fact it had an R&R was proof the paper really existed in a decent form, it wasn’t a pipe dream (more important when the paper was not my writing sample) c) the journal was some evidence. Obviously it is nothing like a publication, but the fact that a top journal thinks a paper is worth sending off to reviewers and not rejecting immediately join receiving their comments seemed to me to a little about peer review assessments of the paper.
My view: list it on the paper and on the CV. Why? I see this so often with people in positions of privilege. It clearly has some benefits–if it weren’t at least a mild feather in one’s cap, the question wouldn’t likely come up. They can do it and others can’t?
The only reason to list R&R on your writing sample (or c.v.) is if it will make a difference in the likelihood you will be hired. From my perspective, it should not make a difference. That is, I have never seen two files so closely matched and the only distinguishing feature was someone had an R&R from a good journal (even great journal) and some did not. So it makes no difference. I regard such things as noise. As someone else noted, a c.v. lists accomplishments – publications, grants won, talks given, courses taught. An R&R does not belong there.
The only reason to list R&R on your writing sample (or c.v.) is if it will make a difference in the likelihood you will be hired. From my perspective, it should not make a difference. That is, I have never seen two files so closely matched and the only distinguishing feature was someone had an R&R from a good journal (even great journal) and some did not. So it makes no difference. I regard such things as noise. As someone else noted, a c.v. lists accomplishments – publications, grants won, talks given, courses taught. An R&R does not belong there.
The only reason to list R&R on your writing sample (or c.v.) is if it will make a difference in the likelihood you will be hired. From my perspective, it should not make a difference. That is, I have never seen two files so closely matched and the only distinguishing feature was someone had an R&R from a good journal (even great journal) and some did not. So it makes no difference. I regard such things as noise. As someone else noted, a c.v. lists accomplishments – publications, grants won, talks given, courses taught. An R&R does not belong there.
I have a somewhat related writing sample question. (Perhaps Marcus, if you deem it appropriate it could be the subject of its own post.) Generally, writing samples are not meant to be anonymised. By that token, editing one’s writing sample in ways one does for peer review is unnecessary for job applications (undesirable in some cases; one’s name should certainly be on the writing sample, in the absence of explicit instructions otherwise, which I’ve seen only once). Here’s the question: should one cut one’s acknowledgments from one’s (in-progress and unpublished) writing sample? (I keep a running list of acknowledgements in my drafts then cut from the anonymised version sent out for review. I know many others do the same.)
The intuitive case for ‘no’ (keep the acknowledgments): We’re to give credit where credit is due, and we do this via citation and acknowledgements. Assuming one did receive useful feedback from the acknowledged persons, absent unusual considerations (like the fact that a certain acknowledgee does not want to be associated with one), you should acknowledge. Acknowledgments also provide information about persons with whom one is in philosophical/academic conversation, and this is desirable information to have about a prospective colleague.
The intuitive cases for ‘yes’ (cut the acknowledgements): Acknowledgements can, at least if famous people are included in one’s acknowledgements, be a sneaky way of signalling status, status that’s unearned. (This point, though, seems to strike equally against acknowledgments in published work.) Acknowledgements, secondly, have their primary function in contexts where the work in question is public, but the writing samples under consideration are unpublished.
The case for cutting strikes me as fairly weak, though I confess my concern might stem from a general awkwardness concerning the double function of acknowledgements: i) express gratitude, ii) signal one’s being part of the conversation. The awkwardness concerning ii) might be symptomatic in part of imposter syndrome thinking.
Anyway, I’d interested to hear what people think.
“That is, I have never seen two files so closely matched and the only distinguishing feature was someone had an R&R from a good journal (even great journal) and some did not. So it makes no difference.”
Pretty sure this is an invalid inference. Anyway, R&Rs can’t just be noise. I imagine you would take it as a better indication of philosophical potential that someone has an R&R at Phil Review than that they have a publication in a journal you’ve never heard of or in a journal with zero standards. And yet you’re saying the latter should go on the CV and not the R&R.
The converse take of R&what is:
–unlikely to hurt you in any job search to list an R you’d have to run into a true asshole to have someone hold this and only this against you because of some (frankly) old-fashioned norms they are holding onto about cv construction.
–fairly likely to help you at least in specific cases like the one assc prof mentions (other cases: someone with zero publications who is ABD and has, say, two R&Rs at decent or amazing journals is likely going to be taken way more seriously at at least some places than someone with zero publications and no R someone who has only published in excellent but not top five journals but has an R&R at Phil Review is likely going to be taken more seriously (at least in the sense of getting a careful look at the writing sample if it is the R&Rd paper) at R1s than someone with the same profile but no R&R…
I have quite a lot of experience doing placement (many, many years). Of course we never know exactly how decisions are made, but my evidence strongly suggests that this stuff can, at least sometimes, make a difference. I would suggest you list R&Rs (and what journal they are at) only on internally submitted job materials, as others suggested above. I do think it looks bad (for more reasons than just compromising anonymous review) when people list this on their websites.
To Ben’s interesting query: I say leave the acknowledgements in. If nothing else, they demonstrates that you have networks, participate in philosophical dialogue with your peers, and can take feedback. All good things. Bigwig signaling is probably not going to move the needle much in either direction, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
I had another thought about the original query, too. A reason NOT to include the name of the journal where you have an R&R is that it is kind of like stolen valor. The reason TO include it is that you hope the warm glow of the journal’s name will shine on your case and make you look good. But you have not published there (yet), so you don’t deserve the borrowed reputation (yet). No doubt the committee will ask you about it in the interview, and you can say then.
I’m a first-time applicant with no publications, but my writing sample has an R&R at a top journal. The advice I’ve gotten has been to make this fact as prominent as possible. Of course the most important part of my application is the writing sample itself, but among single, one-line bits of information on the application, this has got to be the most impactful.
At first I was a bit sheepish about repeating the information a bunch of times in the application — it felt a little gauche to mention the same thing several times, and I was also worried about getting in trouble with the journal. But my mentors were pretty convincing that the benefits of making sure that it would be noticed on an initial glance through my materials outweighed the relatively minor risk of compromising peer review, and that the point of an application is to convince places that you’re a promising scholar, so reiterating evidence to that effect wouldn’t look gauche. I ended up listing it on my CV, cover letter, research statement, and website. But to reduce the risk of compromising peer review, I did take the step of making my website not show up on google searches, so for the most part the only people who come to the website are members of search committees who click on the link in the application.
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