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Listing “selected publications” to avoid drawing attention to a low-ranked journal publication?

In our recent thread on whether publications in lower-ranked journals hurt job-candidates (especially for jobs at research institutions), a reader asks:

Say that a candidate has 15 publications in Various Tippy Top Journals, and 1 publication in No-name Low-Prestige Journal (say, because it’s on a topic that the top journals don’t care about). We’ve heard reported in this thread that that 1 outlier publication could actually hurt the candidate for some research jobs. From the perspective of appealing to premier research jobs, would it be smart for the candidate to simply leave that 1 outlier publication off their CV? Is there any reason not to do that? If they do make that choice, should they represent their CV publication list as “Select Publications”? Or does that not really matter?

It seems wild to me that a hiring committee would hold one outlier publication against a candidate with an otherwise stellar publication record. But, in any case, we’ve discussed leaving things off CVs before and I recall the general consensus being that it’s a big “no, no”–as CVs are supposed to be full records a person’s career accomplishments. Then again, if the CV is transparent in the way the OP suggests, listing “Selected Publications”, then maybe that’s OK?

What do readers think?

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20 responses to “Listing “selected publications” to avoid drawing attention to a low-ranked journal publication?”

  1. Charles Pigden

    I think this is a silly question. The idea that someone who had fifteen publications in top-tier journals would actually be *harmed* by slightly sub-par publication is utterly ridiculous. Hence there is no need develop strategies for dealing with this problem. (Also, how many young philosophers on the job market have FIFTEEN publications in top twenty journals? I am prepared to be impressed by examples of boy or girl wonders, but I suspect that such people are few and far between.)

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      It’s ridiculous but true. The advice I (and others) used to be given shows as much, and that’s why the comments on that earlier thread broke the way they did. (And: many young philosophers have that sort of publication record… I was one of them [and not a ‘wonder’], although only had about 7-8 journal articles in the top twenty-ish journals back then. I had a top 3 PGR PhD… And I struggled for 5 years to land a TT job. (Sounds to me like you were one of those lucky ones who (maybe a long time ago?) got their first job without having to publish much, if at all.)

      Reply
      1. Charles Pigden

        It’s true, that I had not published much by the time I got my permanent job (four papers, including the firm forthcomings, three of them in what are now top twenty journals), and true too that that was a long time ago. But then, I got my permanent job (we don’t do tenure here) three years out from my PhD, after a one-year post-doc and a short-term temporary lectureship. I guess if I had batted about for longer and retained the same rate of productivity (and luck!) I might have accumulated a longer list of top-tier publications. So I suppose that a similar talented person with a six or seven-year stretch as a member of the precariat might clock up, eight or nine top-tier publications. Hence I withdraw my remark about the unlikelihood of a pre-TT philosopher having fifteen top-tier publications. It’s still unlikely, but a lot less so, given the time so many spend in pre-TT limbo.

        However two of my first four papers were definitely outside my then-AOS which was meta-ethics. One was on the Analytic/Synthetic distinction, being a critique of Grice and Strawson, and one was on Philosophy and Literature, being an analysis of Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin. This last was in a low-tier start-up journal which has subsequently disappeared. So it was very much the kind of publication that is supposed to do you damage. (*Well* outside even the top thirty!) However, I don’t think that either the top-tier but non-AOS paper nor my low-tier but non-AOS paper did me any harm. The PQ, AJP and Inquiry papers demonstrated that I could cut the research mustard (then , as now, the department set a high value on research potential), the AJP and the PQ papers demonstrated that I could cut the mustard wrt to my AOS; and the oddball Stavrogin paper demonstrated versatility.

        I guess what I just don’t get is why a department with a strong interest in fostering research quality should be averse to the occasional low-tier paper. The idea is that your people should produce good research. Publications in top-tier journals are a proxy for this, but only a proxy. They are a measure, but a fallible measure, of research excellence (In the long term citations counts are a better measure, though even here, it is bit of a lottery.) Candidates’ top-tier papers are (let us grant) evidence of ability. But if such papers exist how can a low-tier paper *take away* from that evidence? Perhaps it isn’t evidence *in favour* of philosophical ability (though that would surely depend on the paper), but how can it be evidence *against* it?

        Here is how it might work. There are some departments that don’t really care about research quality at all but only by success as measured by a certain metric, specifically the number of publications per person, per annum, heavily weighted by the prestige of the venue. If you do well in terms of this metric, you are good: if not you are letting the side down. A department that measured success in terms of this metric would indeed have a reason not to hire a candidate with some low-tier publications since it would risk bringing done the departmental average.

        And here we come back to the earlier thread and to some of the earlier comments. Such a department would be a pretty horrible place to work. It might score superficial successes but it would be fundamentally inimical to philosophical excellence since people would not be trying to do *good* work but to produce (lots of ) *acceptable * work. These can, of course, coincide but over time I would expect a loss of quality and a loss of joie de philosophie. Furthermore, really successful research departments (and really successful philosophers) are not like this. They are (in my experience) interest-driven not metric-driven. In successful departments it is indeed infra dig not to publish, but this is a matter of meeting a threshold not maximisation. You are expected to produce but are not pressured to be an intellectual Stakhanovite. . Prestigious venues are a plus but not a fetish. In such departments, the occasional low-tier paper is not going do you any harm.

        So the moral is this. If you want to work in a metric-driven department, then having a low -tier paper might put you at a disadvantage. But such a department will be an unpleasant place to work and probably not all that prestigious. Really good departments – meaning research-ambitious departments – probably won’t care if you have some low-tier papers which you can therefore safely leave on your CV.

    2. Anonymous

      Not uncommon to see new grads having published 5+ articles in top 10-ish journals upon or shortly after graduation these days. Many of them do get jobs, but many also don’t. Many give the advice nowadays to avoid publishing an article in lower-tier journals, as that may look worse on paper than not having published that article at all.

      Reply
  2. Anonymous

    I just want to say that if search committees are dismissing job candidates over something like “one publication in a journal I hadn’t heard of,” and if candidates are so concerned about this that they are considering leaving a major professional achievement (a publication!) off of their CV, then I think something has gone horribly wrong with both the discipline of philosophy and its job search process. I find the entire approach of assessing people’s worth as philosophers based on made up prestige rankings of mostly corporately owned publication venues to be inaccurate and inhuman. The celebrity culture in philosophy along with its strict social hierarches is simply juvenile. All the fixation on imagined prestige discourages people from doing actually virtuous research and leading virtuous lives. If someone doesn’t want to hire me because one of my papers doesn’t have enough fake gilding on the walls then I don’t think I want to work with them. /rant

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Those “if”s are doing a lot of heavy lifting!

      Reply
    2. Anonymous

      The voice of reason in a series of threads that read a bit like a fever dream.

      Reply
  3. Daniel

    Pretty much anyone who will judge you for having a publication you want to hide is someone who will go looking for whatever publication you hide by providing a selected rather than complete list of your publications. So, this is typically no help.

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  4. Anonymous

    Alas the zeitgeist tells for obsessing about the one less fortunate publication. Job offers hang on a razor’s edge. Sad, but not necessarily irrational.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    What counts as a “No-name Low-Prestige Journal”? Because a top-30 journal, even if it is outside of the “normal” top-20, does not seem to be a no-name and low-prestige venue. They seem to be well-known and rather highly prestigious, but just less gilded. “No-name, low-prestige” evokes an unknown, hardly formatter, journal from a newly established university out in the middle of nowhere to my mind. Now that’s just my imagination, but it does leave my confused at what is being debated here and in some of the comments to the previous posting on the top-30 journals.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    I am the anon who said I never worried about journals in the last thread and I still stand by it. It is not that nobody would reject you over a perceived “flaw.” A substantial number of people would. But any perceived flaw could put off people, and you have no control over it. For example, even a list of purely top publications can put off a substantial number of people and be perceived as a flaw of ill fit (and more, depending on how you present yourself in person). The point is that, if you do get a decent amount of good work out, *some* people would appreciate it, and not care about the journal distribution. You might still not get a job, since the job market is so broken, but that’s not something you can fix by a fetish over journal ranks.

    Reply
  7. Michel

    ‘Selected’ publications make sense to me when you have a very long CV–say, a hundred or so pubs–a.d want to toss around a short CV.

    They might also make sense to me if you’re really ashamed of something.

    But really, unless you have a hundred pubs,I’m just going to wonder why it’s ‘selected’ and then go looking. Whereas I wouldn’t blink at a publication in a journal I’ve never heard of when it’s balanced out by others in known venues.

    Reply
  8. Anonymous

    I agree with Charles – I don’t think anyone with 15 pubs in major journals is going to be harmed by 1 pub in the North by Northwest Journal of Philosophy.
    To Anon who says “they were one of them” who struggled for 5 years to find a TT job. What makes you think your “one outlier publication” was the reason you struggled to get hired? I know lots of folks with great publication records and NO “outlier pubs” who also struggled or were never hired. I also know in my 25 years at an R1 where we’ve hired about 20 times that I can’t recall any of my colleagues ever ruling out a candidate with strong pubs but also 1 or 2 pubs in obscure journals. I agree the job market is bad and is arbitrary for all sorts of reasons, but I have no evidence that anyone does what the OP says. In all our hiring, if an application has even 1 pub in a major journal, that is enough to get them a second look. We’ve offered jobs to and hired people (even recently!) who don’t have all their pubs in major journals.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I’m that anon who had replied to Charles upthread. I didn’t say I had an outlier publication that was a reason I struggled to get hired; I said I had been given advice, and many others around me had received it too, to avoid publishing in lower reputation/ less-heard-of venues. (The evidence that some people do this is merely derivative from the fact that many philosophers advised such… why would they advise it if it weren’t a thing in some circles?) My main point was: I had mostly followed that very advice, and had published well in top-10-20 journals and not in unheard-of outlier journals, and I still struggled for a long time to get a job.

      (And all this is relevant to the people on here who say: “if so, that’s not a place you want to work anyway!” — That judgment seems right in the abstract, but is hard to sustain when you’re getting no work at all. With no other options, of course one would prefer to be employed, even at such a place.)

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        Sorry I may have misunderstood you. I thought you were using your 5 year struggle on the job market as evidence Charles was wrong that having 15 “well known pubs” and “1 obscure pub” will not hurt you on the job market. I take it we agree that it is no such evidence. I guess your evidence is that your advisors told you that people do this. I’m skeptical that there are such folks, of course (but maybe I just travel in different circles than your advisors) – my point is that I’ve never heard anyone say this (at least not in this extreme case where you have 7 or 8 good pubs and one “no name” pub). The situation might be different if you just had one of each, for example. But that wasn’t what you said.

  9. Anonymous

    Within a massive set of topics that are equally meaningful and significant to the development of philosophy, only a very small subset can make it into top journals—because of what is immediately legible to referees and what editors find trendy, among other things. If the OP’s paper belongs to the very wide subset of topics that are (more or less) impossibly hard to break into the top spots, given their otherwise successful record, I think that publication at a lower-ranked journal would be an asset.

    Reply
  10. Anonymous

    If you’re sure it’s what you want, just exclude the one lower-ranked publication. You don’t need to say “selected publications” unless you’ve made some weird vow that your CV is otherwise exhaustive. Analogously, you put your job history on your CV, but not paper rounds and summer jobs.

    As an established person I routinely leave off minor publications, like book reviews or intros to journal special issues. They’re just clutter and everyone understands they can be omitted. If you consider a full but not well-placed article to be like that too, that’s up to you.

    But a note of warning. A lower-ranked (but still legitimate) publication can help your case, especially if it’s in an area or topic that you haven’t otherwise published on, which may correspond to teaching needs.

    Reply
  11. Anonymous

    If you have 15 publications in good journals and you are having a hard time getting a job, the answer isn’t more publications.

    Reply
  12. Anonymous

    If you do “Select Publications,” you run a high risk of Streisanding that paper. Just list it altogether. If it’s buried among 15 tippy top papers, I don’t think anyone will care much.

    Reply
  13. Charles Pigden

    The following points have emerged form the discussion.

    1) There is no good reason for research-ambitious departments to have a down on candidates who have the occasional paper in a low-end journal (By ‘research-ambitions departments’ I mean departments that want their recruits to regularly produce interesting and challenging contributions to philosophy; the kind of books and articles that raise and solve significant problems, that are likely to be recognised as such and that will hopefully generate plenty of citations.) Publications in high-end journals provide evidence of the kind of philosophical ability that such departments value, but publications in low-end journals do not provide *counter-evidence* of such ability. Indeed, depending on the content of the said publication they may even provide *further* evidence of such ability. If such papers are outside the candidates AOS, they may provide evidence of the kind of breadth that is particularly valuable in small-to-medium departments in which people are often expected to teach outside their original areas of specialisation. That’s a very large proportion of the philosophy departments both in North America and the wider world.

    2) Obviously a publication in a low-end journal is not going to be a problem in departments that emphasise teaching rather than research.

    3) We have had testimony from professors at R1 departments (probably research-ambitious) that they would not mark down job candidates with the occasional low-end publication especially if the rest of their publications were (as the OP puts it) ‘Tippy top’. See Anonymous above: ‘ In my 25 years at an R1 where we’ve hired about 20 times that I can’t recall any of my colleagues ever ruling out a candidate with strong pubs but also 1 or 2 pubs in obscure journals. … In all our hiring, if an application has even 1 pub in a major journal, that is enough to get them a second look. We’ve offered jobs to and hired people (even recently!) who don’t have all their pubs in major journals.’

    3) The only departments with a *good* reason to have a down on candidates with the occasional low-end paper are metric-driven departments where the idea is to maximise per person publications, heavily weighted for prestige of venue. Such departments are going to be depressing places in which to work since apart from the incessant pressure to publish, people are incentivised to produce *acceptable* work rather than *good* work, two categories that re likely to come apart in the longer term.

    4) We have testimony that *some* young philosophers (presumably at top graduate schools) are being advised that a low-end paper can do them damage when applying for jobs.

    Disjunctive conclusion :
    Either a) these top schools are giving their charges really bad advice or b) metric-driven departments are the norm.

    For the reasons suggested by others, I hope that the right answer is a) rather than b).

    Reply

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