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How to get published papers noticed and cited more?

In our July “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

I wanted to ask what one should do to get their paper more noticed and ideally cited. I suspect that this is a phenomenon that is quite widespread but I’ve found that in the areas of philosophy that I work in, a lot of papers go uncited and unengaged with. For example, a couple of papers I’ve published in my subarea about 2-4 years ago (within the top 20 generalist journals) were only marginally engaged with in the work that has been coming out in this area. I recall that even when I was publishing those papers, those reviewing my paper didn’t direct me to other papers that were published that engaged with the arguments I was making. People just seem to keep repeating the same dialectical epicycle seemingly unaware that others have said similar things, and I found this is true even of work that I think is more influential than my own. Maybe philosophers are just terrible at doing lit review or are just lazy. One thing I’ve been thinking of doing (after hearing that some do this) is to email folks who have published recently letting them know about my work and its relevance (like a ‘hey what do you think about this argument that you missed?’). Does this seem like a plausible strategy? Are there any better ones?

I’d be curious to hear answers from readers as well. My own experience is that it mostly just takes time, particularly if you publish consistently. But maybe my case isn’t representative.

What do readers think?

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19 responses to “How to get published papers noticed and cited more?”

  1. Anon

    There are two good strategies. The best would be to shoot for higher-ranking journals. Another would be to be very active and visible at conferences and other events within your subfield.

    I would not email people telling them that they overlooked your work. This will not be perceived well. If you want to email people, do it in the interest of building genuine professional connections that may later lead them to read your work voluntarily. The first email needs to make a light ask, or ideally no ask at all.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I agree–I think you’re more likely to get positive engagement from reaching out to people and showing that you are an interested and knowledgeable interlocutor than from (implicitly or explicitly) calling them out for not citing you.

      Reply
  2. Anonymous

    Obviously I’m not in a position to prejudge your work — but is the paper making a fairly local point within an existing debate? Top journals publish lots of excellent work like that, but such papers can naturally get little uptake because they don’t change the larger dialectical landscape. My instinct would be: rather than chasing citations, try to make the next paper harder to bypass by building a bigger point.

    Reply
  3. Michel

    2-4 yeas post-publication is too short a window, IMO. If you think about it, it can take a few years just to go from a finished draft to a published paper, because of both the vagaries of the review process, and slow times to publication.

    I think most of the best work you can do to promote your work comes before publication. Present your work at lots of conferences. Become a known and friendly face in your subfield, active in your subfield organizations (if there are any), etc. People who already know you will take more notice of you.

    It’s also worth noting that venue matters. Major subfield journals will get more subfield eyes on your work than major generalist journals will, even though the major generalist journal may count for more for hiring and promotion.

    Build up a network of friendly subfield acquaintances. Cheer them on when they publish. And when you publish, announce it on social media so your friendly acquaintances can see. Again, people who already know you will take more notice of you.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    I am a little reticent to give advice on this sort of topic (but I have been cited 3000+ times, so … here goes). I would NOT contact people who you think should be citing your papers and scold them. That will get you nowhere. I have, in the past, sent people who I cite in my papers copies of the papers. This has sometimes been productive, but only if I really discuss their view in some sort of detail. As you note, philosophers are generally quite bad at literature reviews. But, one thing that might help to increase engagement with your papers is framing your discussions of others’ work in positive ways: instead of saying “x fails to do such and such” say “x contributes such and such, but leaves open such and such”. It costs very little to acknowledge in a positive way what someone has done, even if in the end you are going to be critical of their view or go far past it.
    I do think, as Marcus notes, it just takes a lot of time. My most cited paper – over 300 citations – was in print 12 years before it peaked at 30 citations in a year. Since then it collects about 9 to 21 citations a year.

    Reply
    1. Charles Pigden

      I’ve got a question not so much on my own behalf (since I am not very likely to change the habits of a lifetime) as on behalf of more junior readers. 3000+ citations is a pretty impressive haul (it’s about 500 more than I have managed to score) and I get the impression that you are a fair bit younger than I am. So do you have any tips for younger cocooners? We can take it as read that you produce good stuff (and that’s a not-so-secret part of your success); you suggest that it is a good idea not to have too aggressive a polemical style; and you recommend making your material available on Philpapers. But is there anything *else* that you can suggest? I am also interested to know whether you are privileged by proximity to the big cultural centres. (This is, in my view, largely a matter of luck and if you *are* privileged by proximity you would be a fool not to make the best of the lucky hand that you have been dealt.) So without being too specific – since you would obviously prefer to remain anonymous – is there anything *more* that you can say about how you got yourself so well-cited?

      Reply
  5. Anonymous

    Ideally what should happen is that people do more lit review and give people proper credit. But in our world, I think a bit of self-promotion is needed, like

    a) try to just happen to be on the radar of the person who wrote and/or will revise the SEP entry. This happened to me purely out of luck, but I do see that when a particular lit review takes place, it is always the exact items on SEP that tends to get cited.
    b) try to get to know the people who review a lot; ideally become one of those people. In the latter case, never just recommend your papers because you want a citation though. Try to recommend your own work (and those you think are excellent) when and only when they are relevant and constructive.
    c) write a Philosophy Compass, IEP, or 1,000 Word Philosophy entry if they don’t yet exist.
    d) Attend conferences and workshops. Many of specialised conferences and workshops are highly rewarding intellectually, but it is also great to be on the radar of the major and emerging players in one’s field.

    Reply
  6. Anon

    Relevant issue: I (and presumably, lots of people) cite less than we should because references count against the article’s word count. (I think) the basis for this policy depended on space constraints in the physical/hardcopy version of journals. This basis is uncompelling if, when an article is available online, people opt for the online version 99% of the time. This status quo should be changed.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      THIS!! It creates such a perverse incentive structure and really needs to be changed. They could direct readers to the full reference list to be found online if they really need to have their print version be shorter for the 2.4 people in the world actually reading the articles in the official print version

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        I just ignore references when reporting word counts.

      2. Anonymous

        In reply to the other person who replied here, some journals (e.g., Mind & Language) explicitly require you to count references toward the word count and are really strict about it, unfortunately

  7. Anonymous

    OP: Thanks for these comments. I appreciate the advice very much – especially about the framing of the emails if I were to send them. From these comments, it just strikes me how important networking and being known is. Honestly, it can sometimes be hard to attend conferences and network – I’m not based in the US or Europe and with young children it can be hard to travel frequently to these conferences. Recently I had a very depressing experience at a hybrid conference where only three people attended the talk (including the moderator). I guess there’s nothing to do but keep chipping away..

    Reply
    1. Daniel

      Just to add to the point, I am also outside the US and Europe, and it is hard for me to travel for many reasons (mostly because I am very far outside those places and because I have very little money). My first two years in my job, I did make a big effort to travel a lot, and it was very expensive and time-consuming and had a negative effect on my health (and I felt very bad about my carbon footprint). I did however get a lot of networking done, and a lot of the people who met are some of the people who cite my work. After my first two years I stopped traveling (this coincided with COVID, when nobody was traveling, and I decided I was pretty happy not going anyplace, and kept that up after COVID) and I think it has definitely had a negative effect on how many people are citing my stuff. I think if I were still networking more, more people would be citing my stuff.

      Reply
  8. Anonymous

    “b) try to get to know the people who review a lot; ideally become one of those people. In the latter case, never just recommend your papers because you want a citation though. Try to recommend your own work (and those you think are excellent) when and only when they are relevant and constructive.”

    This still seems unethical. After all, you have put reviewing as an item in a list of ways to self promote. That remains so even if you’re going to promote your papers via peer review “when and only when they are relevant and constructive.” Hundreds of relevant and constructive papers could presumably be cited for any given submission, and there’s rarely reason to cite yours in particular.

    I would say increasing one’s own citations must not be a factor at all in reviewing. More than that, one should avoid giving citations to your own work when acting as a reviewer unless absolutely necessary. For instance, it may be that you and Philosopher A both made a similar argument that’s important to the paper under review. If so, it is best to mention Philosopher A only, in order to avoid conflict of interest or its appearance (“cite me or get rejected”).

    Aside from the ethical considerations, non-essential self-citation in reviews can do yourself reputational damage. Obviously you are outing yourself as a self-promoting reviewer to the editors, but often now to the other reviewers as well, who can see others’ reports and will figure that it’s only Philosopher B that would insist that Philosopher B is cited on this point. Unless you are very well known, your papers are unlikely to be the obvious reference points for others that they are for you.

    Reply
  9. Tim O’Keefe

    It won’t move the needle a ton, but put an archived copy of your papers up at philpapers, so people can easily read them without needing to first log in to access a journal, or request them through ILL if their library doesn’t have a subscription to a journal. Also add information about what topics they should indexed under and a few keywords, so they’ll show up in searches or people browsing. And apart from the indirect effects of maybe raising your citation count a little, it’s nice to make philosophical work easier to access.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I think Tim’s case is actually very important. I don’t have access to most pdcnet journals, for example. And given limited research time, I would go for something I can access instead of something I would have to beg authors to get.

      And this also goes into a bit too much detail too, but I would never directly quote some publication if I can only find a pre-print version.

      Reply
      1. Tim O’Keefe

        Right, although it can tricky about what different journals allow as far as posting papers. I haven’t heard of journals cracking down on people posting pdfs of the final version to philpapers, but I myself just post my own ‘penultimate version’ of the paper (i.e. what I sent in to the journal to be typeset), which I’m confident I have the right to do. I figure that doing that allows folks to easily read and engage with the work, and if anybody cares enough about it that they’d be moved to directly quote some part of it in work of their own, then they can take the time to ILL the official final version if their own library doesn’t carry the journal or the book it’s in.

  10. Charles Pigden

    I sympathise with the OP. It can take a VERY long time for work to get noticed, especially if, like me, you are something of an outsider. Nowadays I am pretty well cited and many of my papers get cited straight away, but this is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The first fifteen years of my career were a long trek through a low-citation desert. I have a paper which now has 479 citations but it only had 25 in the first five years from publication. I have a paper published in 1990 which now has a respectable 37 citations which was not cited *at all* for ten years. My least cited paper had to wait 25 years for a single citation (in Polish!) I have another which now has a healthy 88 citations only 5 of which date from the first ten years post publication. What I tend to think of as my best paper now has a satisfying 174 citations, but it only had thirteen citations in the first eleven years after it was first published. I have got a paper with a comfortable 45 citations (I, of course, think that it deserves more) but for 12 years it only garnered three out of those 45 current citations. Indeed, only one of my early papers was tolerably successful from the word ‘go’, but even there only 10% of its 304 citations date from the first nine years after publication.*
    Granting, for the moment, that as I approach my seventieth birthday I ‘deserve’ the citations that are currently rolling in, why did recognition take so long and come so late? Why did I have to wait for *decades* for the happy ending? Because my position was, and to some extent still is, similar to both Daniel’s. & the OP’s. I live at the ends of the earth and work at the Southernmost Philosophy Department in the world. I have never attended any of the big philosophical conferences in America, Britain or Continental Europe, in the early days because I could not afford it and because I too had a young family. So people in the big metropolitan centres did not read my stuff because they did not know me from a bar of soap. And this despite the fact that many of my early publications were in top-tier generalist journals (PQ, AJP) or in top-of-the line specialist journals. (PSS). People did not think ‘Here is a paper by Pigden. Didn’t he make some good points as the APA/Aristotelian Society meeting? I will give it a go.’ They thought ‘Pigden? Never heard of him!’ and left my articles largely unread. Success in the citation stakes tended to come because a few big stars did due diligence wrt to their literature searches and cited my work. After that, the citation snowball started to roll.

    So what does this suggest wrt the OP’s query? What do you need to do to get noticed (with citation counts as a crude proxy for the attention which is what we are all really after). Well, it is not enough to publish challenging papers in top-tier journals, though this can lead to recognition in the long run. What your really need if you want recognition to come QUICKLY is

    a) to live in or near the big metropolitan centres
    and
    b) to get yourself noticed by attending lots of conferences in the said centres and making notable contributions.

    If either of these is problematic for you, recognition in terms of citations may be a long time coming. This does not mean, that you should give up or that there is nothing you can do. Tim O’Keefe is right that it is good idea to have your papers out there on some of the big academic platforms so that it is easy for people to access them (I use Academia.edu.) It is a good idea, if you get the opportunity, to write (or establish contact with the writers of) SEP and Philosophy Compass articles, especially as they are often major citation-spinners in themselves. If you can’t go to conferences at the big Metropolitan centres make point of attending the local ones. I’m sure that attending conferences in Australia and New Zealand has done me a lot of good, though not as much good as if I had attended similar conferences in Europe or America. And if there is blog or an email list in one of your subject areas, it often pays to be active. A lot of opportunities came my way because I was active on successive email lists devoted to the life and work of Bertrand Russell. And – boringly banal advice that is sometimes hard to follow – you should keep on keeping on. But sadly, if you are not close to the big metropolitan centres and cannot easily put yourself about by going to conferences at those centres, success may be a long time coming.

    Let me add a note sympathy. I know how hard it can be to produce what seems to you good work of which nobody seems to take a blind bit of notice. (Apart from anything else it tends to undermine your self-confidence: if nobody thinks my work is worth responding to perhaps this is because it isn’t very good?) I did not realise what drag this was on my overall happiness until my papers started to be recognised and I began to feel better.

    And now for a ‘Don’t do as I do, but do as I say’ piece of advice.

    I tend to write papers of the following form: ’Here is a famous paper by famous philosopher X. It suffers from numerous intellectual defects which ought to have been blindingly obvious to all concerned, including the author.’ Though several of my papers along these lines are now widely cited, perhaps they would have been cited a bit earlier had I been a bit more circumspect. However, I don’t intend to stop writing such papers until death or dementia takes me.

    —————————————-
    *Readers may note a perhaps unbecoming obsession with my citation statistics. This largely due to the fact that until I was in my late forties I had hardly any citations.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      OP: Thanks for this! The long term perspective is very helpful, and yes the self-doubt that comes from wondering why my work isn’t cited as often compared to similar work is at least somewhat driving this..

      Reply

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