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Tips/insights on invited publications?

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

I'd be grateful if people could shed some light on "invited" publications. I see this on CVs: under "research" there are publications which are listed as "invited". These include contributions to edited volumes, but I've also seen what at least appear to be journal articles sometimes listed as "invited". How does one get invited to contribute to an edited volume/journal? Is this something that just happens as one's work becomes more known? Is it more of a social thing; a matter of being friends with the right people? Do "invited" publications go through a blind review process like regular journal articles? From the perspective of hiring committees, do invited publications look just as good a paper that was accepted at a journal after going through blind review? Better? Worse? I'm a junior person who's only ever published by submitting manuscripts to journals. Any info here would be appreciated.

All good questions. My own sense is that invited publications tend not to look as good as peer-reviewed journal articles. Why? Well, because although invited articles typically are peer-reviewed, it's not always clear how anonymized the process is and because there may be more of a general bias in favor of acceptance (for example, in an edited volume, if not enough papers are accepted, then the volume itself may not be viable!). So I think that while invited pieces can be a positive (they show that other people in the discipline are interested in publishing your work), they look best when combined with a strong journal publishing record. But these are just a few of my quick reactions.

What do readers think? Any helpful insights on any of the OP's questions?

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18 responses to “Tips/insights on invited publications?”

  1. Inviter

    “How does one get invited to contribute to an edited volume/journal? Is this something that just happens as one’s work becomes more known? Is it more of a social thing; a matter of being friends with the right people?”
    Mostly by being well known. The friends thing is a factor but not independent of this: better known people are, well, better known.
    “Do ‘invited’ publications go through a blind review process like regular journal articles?”
    You are referring to a wide range of publications with a wide range of practices. But in broad terms, invited articles in reputable journals will be individually double-blind peer-reviewed (not triple blind). Such articles are collected in “special issues.” Sometimes this review process may be gentler than that for regular submissions. Chapters in edited collections often are not individually reviewed – the reviewers for the collection may comment on individual chapters.
    “From the perspective of hiring committees, do invited publications look just as good a paper that was accepted at a journal after going through blind review? Better? Worse?”
    The first question is, do they know it was invited? An article in a special issue of a journal is in the end just an article in that journal, so unless the author has flagged that it was invited, it will just be treated as an article in that journal. Hence, during a first pass (prior to reading) the most important thing is which journal the paper’s in. This is the main reason why invitations are not as important as they might seem, for the top journals have special issues rarely or not at all. By contrast, some mid-tier journals are largely or wholly special issues (there’s also the complication that some special issues have open submissions). Chapters in edited collections are different as they are obviously invited and generally accorded lesser weight. I have heard the argument that chapters in, say, Oxford Handbook of X show that someone has a reputation in the field, but while there’s something to that I’m still pretty sure they would be taken as a less strong quality indicator than a top 10 journal article, say (though in the end, the proof is in the pudding, i.e., reading).
    “I’m a junior person who’s only ever published by submitting manuscripts to journals.”
    Which is the case for a large majority of junior people. Invitations are more the preserve of somewhat established people, and where junior people have them, it’s generally not very impactful for the reasons given above – though there can be some benefit.
    Another way to look at it is that invitations (especially edited collections) give an alternative publishing route where you can write what you want to write, rather than what reviewer 2 wants you to write, giving up some venue prestige for intellectual benefits. This is a particularly good deal for the tenured, and has the nice side effect of reducing submissions to top journals from people that don’t really need to publish there.

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  2. a know it all

    Marcus is correct to note that these invited pieces count for less in some contexts. But they are still a great honour to do, and they can be quite rewarding to write. They are best for mid- or late-career people, I THINK, as these people have a broader perspective on the literature. I have contributed to five or so of these, all on topics I am widely recognized as a significant contributor. In one case, an early career person contributed a piece to the volume. To be frank with you, it is quite a weak piece and did not belong in the volume – he cites his own dissertation. Are these invited volumes refereed? Yes, they are refereed, at least the ones I have been involved with. I have received very constructive feedback from referees on such pieces. And I have edited two volumes of papers on themes with a very good press. In one case, one of the referees insisted that one of the papers not be included. (That was an awkward conversation). As for getting a first TT job, the best thing you can do with respect to publishing is publish in highly ranked journals in your sub-field (for example, Phil Science and BJPS in philosophy of science). Indeed, generally, I think you get better referees’ reports from higher ranked journals.

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  3. whatever

    I believe there was a post recently where someone said something to the effect that they enjoy writing pieces in edited volumes because they allow for more creativity, and because they need not be forced through a referring proofing journal article writing aesthetic. They give you a chance to write on something that may in fact be interesting, just not to those who have become immersed in useless debates in the secondary literature of the sort you find in a lot of journals. With that said, I think we should take invited pieces just as seriously as peer reviewed articles, though perhaps according to a different standard of seriousness. This is the kind of venue where you might see what someone actually cares about, yet what journals refuse to publish. And let’s be real – the anonymity of peer-review is severely compromised these days anyways. I can’t tell you the amount of papers I see in journals where it is clear to everyone in the field who would’ve wrote it, such that there’s no way their referees were ‘blind’. Friends publish friends.

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  4. ugh

    What is wrong with citing one’s own dissertation? Shouldn’t one do this if one is… publishing material that grew out of one’s own dissertation (or that the dissertation is highly relevant to)? And isn’t it perfectly normal for early career people to publish (either as papers, chapters in invited volumes, etc.) papers that grew out of their dissertations? This comment reads… as very snobbish.

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  5. it depends

    I think there’s probably some variety here in how search committees treat invited publications. I also think there is variation by subfield.
    –If it’s invited by and a part of something that’s a bit “who’s who” of your subfield, then it may well be that it means just as much (or perhaps in unusual cases even more) than an elite journal publication specifically at schools that employ mostly reputational tenure assessments (as many elite and elite striving institutions do, where external letters often matter the most for tenure).
    –In most research-focused places, though, I suspect these count for less as part of a job application.
    –Many places, including my own department (for the most part, there is variation individually) wouldn’t care as much where or how something was published as opposed to that the candidate had published something, and then would READ the work. It’s the judgment of the written work that matters, but publication (whether invited or not) is a helpful bar to meet.
    –I think there are a lot of institutions (many of which have hired our students, so I am fairly familiar with their hiring patterns) that care more about teaching or have a mixed focus on teaching and research but where publishing some is necessary for tenure. I think most of those institutions would treat an invited and a non invited publication quite similarly.
    –In some subfields it is somewhat more standard to publish more invited chapters (e.g. some areas of history, continental, etc.) and so there might be less judgment about that in searches in departments with many historians, pluralistic departments, continental departments, etc.

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  6. Daniel Weltman

    As others have mentioned, a lot of this varies from venue to venue. Some “invited” things are pretty rigorously refereed, like the Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Metaethics, and Political Philosophy volumes, for which you first go through an abstract referee process to get invited to a conference, then a paper referee process for your paper to end up in the book, but technically your submission to the book is “invited.” Other invited things are someone’s dissertation advisor’s friend doing a favor for the dissertation advisor by publishing the advisor’s student’s paper in a book or whatever, and they go through relatively relaxed peer review. So, nothing general here can be said.
    Speaking 100% for myself and not at all for anyone else in my department, in the profession, or on this planet, I will say that when looking at CVs for junior people, the number of invited publications often seems to track how well-connected they are, and not things that I typically care about (like capacity to publish in more vigorously peer-reviewed venues). I sometimes think those invited publications should’ve been sent to a traditional journal issue if they were good enough to be published there, and that either they’ve made a mistake going for the easy route because they wanted to publish more rapidly, or they churned something out quickly since they got an opportunity to publish any old thing by happening to know someone. (This is obviously not a blanket judgment and I’m sure I’ve seen plenty of junior CVs with invited publications that I did not judge this harshly!)
    I have no insights about how to get invited except that many conferences turn into volumes someday, either as a matter of course (the Oxford Studies in X) or because a journal special issue is lined up already (noted in the CFP) or as a possible but not guaranteed outcome of the conference (often noted in the CFP) or because the conference organizers are proactive about it and take it upon themselves to gather together people’s papers and pursue publication of them in a journal special issue or via a book publisher (although usually in this case they’d put themselves into the third category by deciding this beforehand). So if you are interested in being invited, one way is to apply to conferences that will result in invites. In some fields in academia most of their publications come from this sort of thing: applying to conferences the proceedings of which are published.

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  7. M

    Invited papers for special issues for some journals (e.g. Synthese and Philosophical Studies does these) are still refereed double-blind (if not triple-blind).
    But in other cases or journals (think most Oxford Studies in ______ , that are published as annuals), they can be lightly refereed or even not refereed at all (at least not in the typical way: they might be sent to someone to look over who may or may not make comments, but who usually won’t be expected to give a verdict on whether to publish it).
    Being invited for such things is cool, and sometimes gives one an opportunity to write something creative or daring without having to worry about “will this pass muster with referees from a top journal?”… But getting invited to such things isn’t something to “pursue”… just try to publish well, and if one gets invited to write something that one already is interested in or wanting to work on, be grateful.

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  8. being connected

    There’s being well-connected as happenstance and there’s being well-connected as effortful activity.
    If people simply happen to have met you at conferences, or have read your work, and then they come asking you to write something, then I think, as M says, just take that as a cool request. But it is not something to pursue, as M also says – just write, and send your stuff out. But if we assume that this is how invited contributions come about for most of us, then I think that means someone like Daniel W is not warranted in holding it against a person that they are well-connected, as he seems to. If your first thought after seeing a couple invited pieces on a junior candidates CV is, ‘Oh, this person must be a networker, or just sociable’, that is an unfair thought to have as you look at a CV, in my IMO. There’s also a tacit implication here that the rogue, asocial, non-conferencing philosopher with papers in Mind and JPhil is somehow a better researcher.
    The move is to have a balanced CV.

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  9. Assistant Professor

    Agree with others that invited publications can be both “easier” to publish in some respects and “harder” in others (getting the invite in the first place) and that they can be really nice outlets for more creative work that isn’t having to meet the whims/norms of peer review in style and content.
    One decision junior people have to make in general is how to reflect information on their CV. Many people have separate sections for peer reviewed publications or talks than invited publications or talks. But for junior people who don’t have enough publications (or talks) for separate sections under each of these headings, you might simply have an “articles” section (and a “presentations” section) and as long as you aren’t doing this in a misleading way, that might be okay. I tend to think only have one or two publications and they are invited is not great optics and I would probably just call them “articles” on my CV rather than draw attention to their invited status.

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  10. Daniel Weltman

    @being connected: I would not say I hold it against people that they are well-connected. I just don’t hold it in their favor. That mostly tracks being rich enough or going to a rich enough school such that you can travel to lots of conferences, having enough free time to go to those conferences (or being willing to cancel enough classes to go to those conferences), having a dissertation advisor who introduces you to people actively, etc. None of those things makes someone worse in my eyes, but they don’t make someone better, either. It’s like having a certain hair color or eye color. If you listed that on your CV it wouldn’t move the needle at all. Ditto if you know a bunch of people.
    So, I don’t think the rogue asocial whatever is a better researcher. But I do think if they have publications in rigorously peer-reviewed venues and the sociable person doesn’t, this counts in favor of the rogue. And the worry is that if you have a good publication that you put in an invited venue, you waste an opportunity for putting it into a more rigorously reviewed venue, and thus hurt yourself. For senior people this doesn’t matter, since they have enough publications in other places. But sometimes I see a grad student from some Ivy League or whatever with only invited publications, and I feel like they’re hurting themselves by not aiming higher.

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  11. AP

    Nice work is still nice work even if it is invited and not blind reviewed. But at the end of day, it doesn’t count much in hiring. Also, when I zoom into comparing shortlisted candidates, I almost never read their invited work. So I wouldn’t really know whether it is actually nice or not.

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  12. Inviter

    I would take a view between that of Daniel Weltman and “being connected.”
    There is simply a much higher bar to clear for a regular submission to a good journal than there is for a typical invited piece, so the regular submission counts for more. But the invited piece still counts for something, especially if in a prestigious volume. (And if it’s invited in a good journal then it counts near the full value of a regular article there.)
    I take it this is an intermediate position as (1) Daniel is saying the invited piece is not tracking what he’s interested in so presumably does not add value even if all else (e.g. regular journal articles) is equal, whereas I think it certainly does add value, just not as much; and (2) “being connected” objects to Mind/JPhil pubs as grounds for considering someone a better researcher than the invited author, whereas I think they offer defeasible evidence for that view. (Of course, the final determination is made by reading things.)

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  13. being connected

    @Daniel Weltman: As far as the discussion is focused on quality of work, I take your points (with some mild suspicion, since I am skeptical about how rigorous peer-review turns out to be). But I reject, again, these odd assumptions you are making about the kind of person who would have work in an edited volume. I teach a 4/4 at regional university (and my parents didn’t go to college), and I’ve got some pieces in edited volumes and in peer-reviewed journals. So I’m neither rich nor do I work at a rich school. I’ve happened to get invited to some things, and I’ve written the things I was invited to write. If anything, my background being the opposite of what you imagine the background of someone with invited pubs to be has maybe led to these invites because I am happen to be trained in that excellent non-academic field of having, wait for it, social skills. See, what I reject is this implicit denigration of the sociable philosopher, and the counterpart valorization of the anti-social one.

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  14. Tim O’Keefe

    I’ve contributed a lot of papers to by-invitation books since I’ve gotten tenure, and generally I’m glad that I’ve been able to do so. As noted above, at an early career stage you’ll want to make sure that you have a good number of papers published the usual way.
    But another potential pitfall of contributing to edited volumes is that they sometimes can take a long time to be published. Especially if it’s some sort of handbook/companion/etc.-type volume with lots and lots of invited chapters, you can be at the mercy of tardy contributors. (I had one case where the volume came out more than 5 years after I submitted the revised version of my chapter.) In my case it was no big deal, because I’m already tenured, but if you are going to rely on one of these papers counting for you when you go up for promotion, you’ll want to check the policies at your institution. Would a letter from the volumes’ editors testifying that the final version has been submitted and approved for publication be sufficient, or do you need page proofs, or does the volume the paper is in need to be officially out…?

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  15. David

    Based off of what Daniel Weltman said above, are publications in conference volumes, where everyone who participated in the conference receives an invitation to submit their paper for review, functionally identical to invited publications?

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  16. Daniel Weltman

    @being connected: obviously sometimes being connected does not track being rich or whatever, and instead tracks social skills. But I treat social skills like basketball skills: nice to have, but not the sort of thing I am looking to evaluate when hiring. So although I commend you on your excellent social skills and I’m glad they’ve afforded you opportunities to be published in invited venues, I would not hold it against someone for lacking such skills and therefore not having been offered such opportunities.
    I don’t think saying this is “denigrating” social people and valorizing anti-social people. Rather your approach seems to me to be denigrating anti-social people by holding it against them that they lack invited publications that they otherwise would have if they were more social.
    If sociality/anti-sociality were randomly distributed like eye color or whatever then this would be a weird quirk of yours but nothing to get hung up on, but since “bad” social skills are often attendant to neurodivergence, being from certain cultures foreign to the one in which the evaluation is taking place, and other features that make people targets for discrimination for other reasons, I think it’s sometimes quite bad to hold it against someone that they are anti-social.
    For these reasons (and others), I prefer my approach, where everyone gets treated equally no matter how social they are.
    @Tim O’Keefe: my one and only invited publication was submitted to the relevant conference in May 2022. 3 years later the volume is still not published and I have no idea how long it will be until it is (the drafts are due at the end of this month, so the book still has to be copy-edited, formatted, probably peer reviewed, permissions from authors must be gathered, etc!). If I needed publications for tenure or promotion I would be freaking out!

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  17. MPA

    As a number of comments have noted, much of this depends on many factors. To me, the most significant factor is stage of career (and the second is where you want to end up or where you are… teaching institution? R1? ranked phd?). I would advise the best strategy while on the market or pre-tenure is to maximize the number of articles that can be called “anonymously refereed” (as others note, oftentimes this includes special issues of journals). If you have more than 2 or three of these while on the market, I would recommend making it crystal clear by having it as a sub-section of your publications area called “Peer-reviewed Articles”. For those on the market and those pre-tenure, these are the gold standard.
    For those going up for tenure at a place like where I am (a middle size R1), you need to have nearly all of your publications be articles of this sort. Having invited articles/chapters will be something laudatory (they speak to one’s reputation, etc) but they cannot replace articles.
    After tenure, as others have noted, being invited to contribute something on the basis of your reputation shows influence (e.g., for promotion). But even still, the promotion case needs to be primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed articles or research monographs. Nearly all of this is dependent upon context.
    So, to the OP’s questions: “From the perspective of hiring committees, do invited publications look just as good a paper that was accepted at a journal after going through blind review? Better? Worse? I’m a junior person who’s only ever published by submitting manuscripts to journals. Any info here would be appreciated.”
    I would never turn down an invitation to publish something (I have never turned one down). However, for every invited piece you publish you need to have at least the same number (maybe more) of peer-reviewed pieces (or equivalent book output).
    To the question: “How does one get invited to contribute to an edited volume/journal? Is this something that just happens as one’s work becomes more known? ”
    You just have to know people, or have people who know you pass your name along when they are asked. It takes time and a lot of indirect networking. A strategy: do something that bring you to the attention of many in your area early in your career (e.g., organize a workshop/special session at a conference and comment on lots of papers during that conference or edit a book and invite all the well-known people).

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  18. Charles Pigden

    ‘How does one get invited to contribute to an edited volume/journal? Is this
    something that just happens as one’s work becomes more known?
    Or
    B) more of a social thing; a matter of being friends with the right people?’
    Answer: (to quote Grandpa Simpson) ‘it’s a little from column A and a little from Column B’, with the column B entries often partially dependent on the column A entries. There is also a quality component too (‘Is the work any good?’) and importantly, I suspect, a substantial dollop of luck.
    Example 1: Most of my publications on Bertrand Russell’s ethics were invited, but the initial invitations were due to the fact that I was an active participant on successive email lists devoted to Russell’s life and work. I must have written hundreds of thousands of words on Russell, but to begin with those words were largely confined to the russell-l email list. As a result of of all this Russell-related emailing, I became well-known within the Russellian community, though I have never met most of them in the flesh. So the initial invitations were due to a rather odd kind of work, which meant that I was online friends with the ‘right’ people.
    Example 2: By far my most successful invited paper, and for many years my most successful paper period, is the entry on Naturalism in Peter Singer’s Companion to Ethics. In terms of citations it has been a regular ‘earner’ since it was first published in 1990, and it is only quite recently that it has been surpassed by a non-invited paper of similar vintage. Why did Peter invite me to contribute? Obviously I don’t know for sure, and he himself might very well have forgotten, but I can make an educated guess at the relevant factors. 1) Peter is an Australian, he probably wanted Australasia to be well represented in in his collection, and I had a personal reputation in Australasia as an active contributor to discussions at meetings of the AAP. So again this was ‘knowing the right people’ but being known, in part, because of my philosophical activities. 2) Peter probably wanted a balance between the young and old and he knew of me as a competent young philosopher. 3) By the time of the invitation, I had published two relevant articles in top journals, one in the AJP and another in Phil Quarterly. I relied on both of these when writing up the paper for Peter. So again, ‘it’s a little from Column A and a little from Column B’, with the column B entry partially dependent on the column A entry.
    Example 3, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Most of my papers on this topic nowadays are invited, but although I have plenty of friends in the conspiratorial community , the invitations are chiefly due to my earlier work in this area and specifically to two NON-invited papers, one from 1995 and one from 2007. The 1995 paper helped to kick off conspiracy theories as an area philosophic inquiry. Hence the invitations, though I suspect that these invitations would dry up if I were not a solid performer on this topic.
    Example 4, the Lakatos entry the Stanford of which I wrote about two thirds. This was almost entirely a matter of being friends with the right people, or more specifically, the right person. My coauthor and former boss, Alan Musgrave is a noted student of Lakatos and had been invited to write the entry on Lakatos for the Stanford. However he was finding it hard going (I think because of his conflicted feelings towards Lakatos, an inspirational mentor who turned out to have done some terrible things) and he asked me to help him finish it. I think Alan selected me because he thought that I could bring myself up to speed and because he had a lot of confidence in me as a writer and also, because we were colleagues, which meant he could keep an eye on me. But however that may be, getting the invitation was very much a matter not of what I knew but of who I knew. It owed next to nothing to previous work in this area since I had no publications on the Philosophy of Science and only one on the Philosophy of Mathematics.
    Okay, that’s how to get invitations, now let’s consider the thing from a careerist point of view.
    Invitations to submit presuppose a sufficiency of friends or a work-based reputation and these typically take time to acquire. If your work is to work for you by generating invitations, people need time to read, learn and inwardly digest it; so work-based invitations are unlikely to arrive for several years after you first get going. (Getting an invitation to write for Peter Singer’s Companion to Ethics after three years on the job market was a major stroke of luck for me.) Thus trying to to get yourself invitations is probably not a good strategy for a young philosopher in search pf a permanent post. This does not mean of course that you should not pass up the opportunity to write an invited paper if one happens to come your way. An actual but invited publication in the hand is worth a couple of uninvited but merely potential publications in the bush, however prestigious their merely possible venues may be. (However as some contributors have noted there is an important caveat here. Edited collections can take a long time to see the light of print. I have been both a victim and a perp in this regard, having edited two collections that took an unconscionable time to come out and having had a ‘forthcoming’ that took years to come forth. )
    Once you have achieved a permanent post, there are two ways that invited publications can be good for your career. They can be good when it comes to promotions (or the search more prestigious employment), and they can be good when it comes to producing the kind of work that is widely read and influential. It may be that a paper in a special issue, edited by one of your mates, is not going to win you as many promotional brownie points as an uninvited paper in Mind, but that does not mean that it won’t do you any good at all. And an invited paper in a Cambridge Companion or an Oxford Handbook may well be right up there with a Mind publication since the invitation itself provides evidence of a pre-existing reputation. (This is why people sometimes boast about papers being invited.) As for being widely read and exerting an influence (which presumably is what we really care about), my ‘Naturalism’ paper in the Singer Companion has been at least as influential in advancing my views on No-Ought-From-Is as the AJP paper on which it is partly based. My top five invited papers have 302, 114, 114, 96 and 60 citations respectively. And it is not as if it is just me or just old fogeys such as myself. Gillian Russell is at least 20 years younger than I am and she owes a substantial slice of her well-deserved reputation to two invited papers in my anthology Hume on Is and Ought. (She gave the papers at a conference I had organised whilst she was still a graduate student at Princeton. I had thought that editing a book-of-the-conference might be a good idea, but after I heard her two papers the good idea metamorphosed into a duty.) Going back into the past, Quine’s first and best paper, ‘Truth by Convention’ originally appeared as an invited paper in a festschrift for Whitehead. His ‘Carnap and Logical Truth’ was originally invited for the Schilpp volume on Carnap, Goedel’s ‘Russell’s Mathematical Logic ‘ was invited for the Schilpp volume on Russell and Lakatos’s ‘Popper on Demarcation and Induction’ was first published in the Schilpp volume on Popper. Indeed Lakatos’s most famous paper the MSRP was the result of a AUTO-invitation since it originally appeared in a collection edited by himself
    Bottom line: Although an ‘invited papers first’ strategy would probably be mistake for a young philosopher on the job market, they can’t do you any harm, and once you have got a job they are no bar to professional advancement. More importantly, they can be as good or better when it comes to making a scholarly impact.

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