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In our November “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:
I’m trying to publish a paper on a fairly niche topic. How should I prioritize between top-tier specialist journals and second-tier generalist ones, from a career/CV perspective? Background: I already have publications in top-tier specialist journals, but not in generalist journals.
What do readers think?
I’d submit it to whichever one will get the most people reading it that you’d want to have reading it. If it’s a fairly niche topic, that’s probably the top-tier specialist journal.
I specialize in ancient philosophy, and I’m a full professor at an R1 school. All of my journal publications have been in specialist journals (I’ve had a lot of papers in edited volumes too), and it’s never seemed to hurt me. The audience for the sorts of papers I’m writing follows the top-tier specialist journals, and probably mostly doesn’t follow all of the 2nd-tier generalist journals.
I think that this is the right way to approach this question both from a narrow career/CV perspective and from a wider perspective. More widely, I want my work to become a part of the scholarly conversation, to have people read it and respond to it. But more narrowly, if that happens, then people in the field will start to know who I am, so I’ll get invitations to submit things to edited volumes, to present papers, and my letter writers at promotion time will be familiar with my work already and can say so.
I agree with the first comment. I work in philosophy of science and the real action in the field happens in the top specialist journals. Rarely is something interesting published in the generalist journals, even in the so-called top one. You really want to reach the readership. And certainly in philosophy of science it is the journals with “philosophy of science” in their titles.
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