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What is a competitive publication record for new philosophy PhDs?

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

I’m currently a PhD student at a PGR top-15 department. Given the current job market situation, I’m wondering what a realistic publication record should look like by the time I graduate. Roughly how many journal publications would be enough to be competitive? I already have one paper published in Synthese. My minimum hope is to secure a postdoc, though of course a tenure-track job would be ideal. What should I aim for from here?

What do readers think?

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23 responses to “What is a competitive publication record for new philosophy PhDs?”

  1. Daniel

    Even today when things are as competitive as they have ever been, I sometimes see people hired with no publications. So, 0 is the minimum to be competitive, at least in some contexts. In any case, your best bet is to start looking at people getting the sorts of jobs and postdocs you’d be interested in getting, and checking what their CV looks like.

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  2. Anonymous

    I got my PhD from a top 30-PGR School, that was not in the US or North America. I secured a really prestigious postdoc without any publications immediately after finishing my PhD.

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  3. Anonymous

    I think you can get better information on this by looking at the last three years of graduates from your own institution. Look at all the candidates, and look at how many publications they had (and where the publications were). This can easily be found on Google Scholar (or the Web of Science). And then look at who got jobs and where (and what kind of job).
    I do not thing there is a single reliable number for all people entering the market. Where you get your PhD makes a big difference for what you need on the market.

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  4. Anonymous

    The comment seems to assume that competitiveness on the job market is a function of number of publications, and that’s just false. There are applicants with 0 or 1 who get TT jobs out of graduate school every year; there are applicants with over 10 who strike out every year. There are too few jobs and too many qualified applicants for number of publications to do more than only very roughly correlate with job market success. What’s most important in making you stand out is that your work be good, and that people can speak to its quality.

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    1. Anonymous

      It’s false that the most important thing is your work be good when many get jobs with no publications. The fact is that the profession is still under unfair and unjust prejudices against those with PhDs from “lower ranked” programs. If you come from a higher ranked program you do not have to work as hard. It’s that simple.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        I don’t deny prestige bias is a thing; I do deny that good work isn’t a necessary condition for getting a job. It is rare, but people can and do have excellent work that is as yet unpublished, which becomes their writing sample and can be spoken about by letter writers.

  5. Two cents

    My two cents: For a postdoc publications are good but not necessary. Postdocs are often attached to projects and thus “fit” is very important and can make up for lack of publications. As for permanent jobs at R1s, it is such a buyer’s market. The applicant pool is full of folks on their second postdoc with close to a dozen publications and a book deal.

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  6. Anonymous

    I donno, but I would advise OP to occasionally look at PhilJobs “Appointments.” Try to find people who are hired for their first jobs, rather than looking at tenure-track moves. Synthese is great, but a lot also depends on the quality of that individual paper. You would also have to try to have other pubs.

    One thing to note is that a job talk typically wants a not yet accepted/published paper. Once, I accidentally published my job talk, and had to piece together another job talk in a very short period of time…

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  7. Anonymous

    There’s a false assumption baked into the question: “how many journal publications would be enough to be competitive?” There is no such thing as ‘enough’, in the sense that this does not track anything useful (as other commenters have noted), even when factoring in variables like where you did you PhD, or other employment experience. There just is no formula, unfortunately. Some people get TT jobs with 0-1 publications, others can’t get jobs even with 10+ pubs and articles in Nous and PPR and Mind and/or a PGR top-3 PhD.

    The best advice is two-fold: i) try to publish 2-3 articles in strong journals, while being aware that publishing too well (in top 5 journals) can effectively remove you from contention at all but the highly ranked departments; and ii) stop obsessing about whether you’ve done (or are ‘good’) enough, just give it your best effort and acknowledge that there is so little under your control. I know that may not be especially helpful, but as someone who has struggled on the market for about 8 of the past 15 years (even though I’ve published well and had some nice postdocs and even was tenured), these are the lessons about anxiety and self-understanding I had to learn.

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    1. publeteer redux

      Re prong 1: I have to say, that’s just not true. I am in my first cycle on the market and have eight publications, of which three are in those type of journals and the rest landing in the top journals for my specialty. This cycle, I got tenure track offers at a community college and a non selective R2, and talked in some capacity about my research in every cover letter I wrote. I think that this is more a function of selection bias with those who publish to that extent not convincingly positioning themselves in their job materials as someone who is a Professional Teacher—someone for whom teaching is their primary vocation. You just need to get faculty members at those types of schools to give you honest feedback on how your materials make you sound.

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    2. Anonymous

      “[B]eing aware that publishing too well (in top 5 journals) can effectively remove you from contention at all but the highly ranked departments”: is the consensus that this is true? Because I personally noticed I haven’t gotten any interviews in the past two years after publishing in elite journals, whereas I did before. I’ve wondered if this is one of my problems.

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      1. Anonymous

        Lol. publeteer redux seems not to recognize that “can effectively remove you from contention” in some cases is compatible with it not effectively removing someone in other cases. They also seem self-congratulatory in “convincingly positioning themselves” so as to get some community college/ R2 job offers (congrats to you, btw!), and are scolding others who have not similarly succeeded for having not gotten proper feedback from teaching-heavy faculty… This is exactly the kind of hubris that attends to someone succeeding at both publishing and at the job market *in their time on the market*. But I implore you to take it from me and others, who’ve published as well or better, and who marketed themselves as teachers (indeed, I spent a decade teaching 8 courses a year at a small college, and was tenured for doing so, so I know something about positioning myself primarily as a teacher), that even doing all those things correctly is insufficient for landing a job (any job) most of the time. It’s absurd to write sentences like “you just need” to get the right feedback on your cover letter etc. It is just an obvious fact of the market that it is usually a struggle to get teaching places to take one seriously when one publishes well; and for R1/R2 places, to consider you with strong pubs in any case… That is why there just is no formula.

      2. Anonymous

        I’m not either person you’re responding to, but my sense is that this is absolutely true at *some* places and I have certainly heard seasoned faculty in the field express the sentiment that you can miss out on jobs due to appearing “overqualified”. Now, as publeteer redux says, I seriously doubt that appearing “overqualified” for a job will legitimately sink you at every such institution. But at many smaller or less fancy places, my impression is that a department will get a TT line and be well aware that if the person chooses to move jobs, they might not get that line back. You can see why a place like this, if they know that they are not a “desirable” job (maybe due to location or teaching load?), could suspect that an applicant with pubs in Ethics and Nous is liable to go back on the market, succeed, and lose them their coveted line.

      3. Anonymous

        I think that the phenomenon you point to here, while it exists, exists at a narrow subset of schools–not a wide enough subset by any means to “remove you from contention at all but the highly ranked departments.” It mainly exists at schools that are good enough to have midsize departments with multiple recent faculty, and to get applications from a wide set of recent fancy PhDs, but not themselves Leiter-ish. But these are not, in fact, most teaching jobs, which are at non-selective non-research schools. The schools who have enough recent TT hires to have recent experience of being used in a stepping stone are in the minority. To borrow, if you’ll forgive me, an analogy from undergraduate admissions, it’s like “yield protection,” where the aspirational, prestige-conscious (but not yet hugely prestigious) colleges, your Tufts and Northwestern types, reject the guys who are for sure going to Harvard or MIT. Yes, it does happen, but it still doesn’t mean that it’s Harvard or bust, you’re still probably getting into UMass Amherst. My experience of community colleges, and to a lesser extent non-selective non-research small philosophy departments is that they do not know or care what Nous is, even. An absolute majority of philosophy departments in America do not have one recent faculty member from a Leiter-ranked program.

        About materials: when putting together materials for teaching focused schools, you have a lot of latitude in how you do so. Most faculty at teaching focused schools aren’t going to Google you. There’s no law that dictates that you put all your pubs on your CV if you have a Selected Publications heading–at a community college you could probably even get away with putting *no pubs at all* on your CV, because they don’t even care about the section. I’ve seen CVs before that, however bafflingly, didn’t even include experience sections. Are there risks to doing so? Mainly that a department might think you’re condescending to them, but this is something you mitigate by doing a good job of selling yourself as someone who really, truly loves to teach. It’s tough, I sympathize, but I do think that there are a lot of levers you can turn.

  8. Anonymous

    Contrary to all of the sound advice others have given, my sense is that if you’re going the postdoc route via external grant funding, then publications seem to matter a lot more. I applied for grants right out of my PhD with something like 3 or 4 publications in top specialist journals, but I didn’t get the funding. (I did, however, get the postdoc through separate funding the prof I wanted to work with happened to have, so it turned out to be a good networking opportunity). I now just applied and secured several grants for an additional postdoc, including from the agency I originally applied to. I think my application was helped by the fact that I now have 8 articles plus about 6 commentaries or book chapters.

    Reply
    1. Two cents

      Im curious if you’re writing from a European perspective (if so, everything you say sounds right to me). As a PI in America, candidates with publications are great. But the hiring decision can often be about whether the candidate brings whatever specific thing the grant calls for, and less so their publishing track record. That’s been my experience at least!

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      1. Anonymous

        The postdocs I was referring to were both in the US. The first postdoc, which was funded by the professor I wanted to work with, was a philanthropic gift. But the external grants I secured were Canadian and American.

  9. Anonymous

    Relatedly, it would be great to hear from recent search committees on what their impressions are regarding what competitive candidate profiles look like.

    Reply
  10. publeteer

    The basic answer is that for research-ish schools it’s highly contingent on AOS and the reputation of your department, and for most teaching-forward schools you’ve already cleared the requisite ABD research bar with your one Synthese pub (though it’s unlikely you’ve already done so with teaching coming from a top-15). So assuming you had the requisite teaching record, let’s say five or six sole instructor classes with good evals: if you want a job at a community college, you’re there; at a non-selective liberal arts college, you’re there; for a very selective liberal arts college or non-selective R2 you’re likely a few pubs in comparable journals away. And if you want a job at an R1 and work in an area with weak demand like the core analytic areas, there is really no ‘enough’—but journal quality (or at least prestige in the eyes of the snobby) is going to count for much more than journal quantity. One PhilReview pub plus fancy letters might do it, but conversely there are people with five Nous type pubs who struggle to get jobs out of postdocs. If you want those jobs I genuinely would say something like you should be researching all the time, all day every day, and even then not expect to get them. And, worth noting, the most common way people fail to get a job isn’t due to the absolute badness of the job market so much as having not a stellar enough research record for an R1 and yet not enough solo teaching experience for a teaching school, so I would advise for nearly everyone covering your bases with giving the latter more attention.

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    1. Anonymous

      One issue I’ve found is that while I’d be willing work outside of an R1, but nonetheless, I work in a core analytic area with weak demand. You seem to be saying that R1s are more AOS sensitive than other jobs, but I’m honestly not sure that’s true. I just don’t see non-selective R2s, SLACs, etc. hiring formal metaphysicians (just as an example) very often. That kind of thing makes me think it’s R1 or bust for me, simply because nobody else will hire me given my specialty.

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      1. Anonymous

        It’s not that research schools (plus the very selective) are more AOS sensitive, it’s that the supply/demand imbalance in some AOSes is just absolutely larger, and because it’s mainly research schools that are hiring for a definite AOS (non-research schools run more open searches than all other AOSes combined), you’re more subject to AOS-specific effects if you’re aiming for a research school. There are in absolute terms fewer people per job who work in e.g. political philosophy than metaphysics. Either person can apply to open searches in the teaching market, but they are mostly only competitive for AOS-specific searches in the research market, because only superstars tend to win research searches at research institutions. So you’re betting on your strength as normed against the productivity of the rest of your AOS in market one, whereas you’re betting on your teaching strength as normed across the whole teaching market in market two. To give you some concrete data here: the median junior tenure-track hire in ancient at a Leiter-ranked school has 4 publications by 12 months from their hire date, whereas the median hire in feminist philosophy has 5 publications, the median hire in philosophy of language has 7, and the median hire in epistemology has 8. Of course this is also going to be confounded by the relative bar to publication in each AOS.

        If I were a placement director, and I was advising someone who worked as a formal metaphysician who wanted to be competitive for a broader range of jobs, because they were worried they wouldn’t get a job if it were really R1 or bust, I would give two pieces of advice: 1) write a paper that has crossover relevance to another field like social or ethics, even if only tangentially, so that you can play it up for teaching-oriented jobs that are nominally open but with a social/value theory AOC, and 2) pick up adjunct teaching at a community college or comparable area school. The former makes you competitive for non-selective non-research schools, and the latter gives you the teaching experience that the departments who just care about proven ability to teach the courses they run mainly select upon.

  11. Anonymous

    Our regional R2 (no grad program in our field) has run five searches in the last nine years or so. Everyone we have seriously considered has had a least one publication. That wasn’t a requirement, the pool was just that competitive. It was also competitive in that everyone we seriously considered had taught ~2 (or more) courses on their own (not just TA). So, don’t trade off one for the other. The reality is, you need to be strong in every dimension in this market.

    I’ve seen new grads with huge numbers of pubs (>5) and they were a turn off for us as a teaching-focused department. (For more experienced candidates, there can’t be a number that is too high.) There isn’t a formal minimum, but I’d say 1-2 gets you the right level of attention. Adding a third is a bonus, but isn’t probably doesn’t give much of a boost over someone else who is otherwise roughly equivalent but “only” has two pubs. Margins of diminishing returns and all that. (So, if it is a trade off between getting the third pub before graduating or getting your first course as instructor of record, definitely take the teaching. Ideally, do both. But even more ideally, graduate on time.)

    I’d say this is a general plan that works in most cases: Starting a couple of years before graduating, aim to get one publication per year. That is a pretty typical rate for earning tenure, once you are in a tenure-track role, so establishing a record that shows you can keep that pace is a big positive.

    FWIW, there are a lot fewer postdocs than tenure track jobs, and way fewer than temporary teaching positions, so saying you want “at least” a postdoc is not really the right framing. Postdocs in some subfields might be the hardest thing to get.

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  12. Anonymous

    I can speak for (some of) the European postdoc market. If the postdoc is in someone else’s project, then fit (and often, networking) counts for a lot more than number of publications. So 0-1 pubs of the level you describe may be enough. If you are looking at securing “open” postdocs or your own funding, even for junior postdocs (e.g. <3 years from PhD), forget it, especially if your PhD was longer than 3 years (e.g a typical US program).

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