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In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
I’m an early career philosopher and I have a few publications that I think make interesting and valuable contributions, and I’m itching for my work to be engaged with, though I understand that it takes time.
Can people share insights about this and maybe tell about the first time their work was engaged with?
Share away!
Not to be discouraging, but it took about 20 or 25 years for the philosophically rich and interesting subfield I was first to publish in to gain traction, and now I’m finally getting citations at a decent rate. But it was “crickets” for so long that I stopped working in that subfield 15 years ago.
Six months for me. One of the heavy hitters in my field devoted an entire paragraph to all the reasons I was wrong 😀 It was a working paper at the time; ended up in a good, but not elite, place.
I responded in a section of an article that was published two years later. And then last year, I was at a conference and watched a talk that author gave on a paper in which they cited my most recent work. Afterwards, most of the commenters seemed to back my interpretation over the other author’s (though none of them knew I was in the audience as I’m not really known).
It is interesting when someone first interacts with your work.
The first time anyone engaged with the actual arguments I’d given they misspelled my name. On the other hand, it was nice to have a “big name” in the field criticize my view, since I was able to get another publication by responding to them. However, 90% of the citations of my work don’t engage with any of the details of my views. I suppose that might be typical?
I was lucky–with the very first paper I published, the editor of the journal was in the final stages of working on a book where they put forward an idea similar to the one I was arguing for, but not as fully developed. So when they agreed to publish the paper, they asked if they could include a footnote to my paper in their book. (Of course I said yes.) But usually it takes a while. I’d suggest putting copies of all of your papers–penultimate drafts if need be–up on philpapers/philarchives so that everybody can easily read them. The full text also get indexed on google that way.
I think the first came a year after my first real publication, in the form of a reply paper. Since then it’s accrued a fair few citations, mostly along the lines of “here are a couple of people with this crazy view”.
I’ve had a bit of a published back-and-forth with the author of that reply, though, and as a result we’ve sort of carved out a bit of a cottage industry for ourselves, and are busy spreading our tendrils into adjacent debates. So now I get a fair few more “crazy view” citations, but alongside a growing number of others, which is nice. And I get a modest number of invitations to present on or publish stuff related to it. I keep thinking I’ve exhausted what I have to say, then someone drags me back in and it turns out I can say a bit more!
I will say, however, that what I think is my most important philosophical contribution to date (published a few years after the first) gets plenty of reading, but basically no engagement.
I think the question is a bit ambiguous (as it apparent from the various replies) … it depends on what you mean by “engage with”. But for me engagement with my work came late. Now my work has been cited more than 3000 times.
Here are three stories related to three sub-fields/topics I work in.
(i) I had been publishing on a topic for a few years and went to a conference overseas. A big name made a point of saying how much he liked one of my papers. That was important. That was about 12 years after my PhD. That paper is now cited over 50 times.
(ii) I published a book with a top press about 14 years after finishing my PhD. The leader in this sub-field (different from the above sub-field) really liked the book and began including me in all sorts of conferences and workshops. This is where I have really left my mark.
(iii) I published a paper in a top specialty journal on a niche topic (a fringe topic at that time), 5 years after my PhD. Now, it is a developing sub-field and moving fast – my paper has been cited more than 300 times. This paper is cited in many different fields, for a variety of reasons. And most of the philosophers who cite it are 10-20 years younger than me. They got the sub-field moving.
So do not expect engage with your work until you have been in field for 10 years or more. But it is important to keep publishing good work.
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