Publishing in Philosophy

7.11.
2015
www.owl232.net/publishing.htm
Publishing in Philosophy
Contents
I. About This Page
A. What is this?
B. Who am I?
II. How Things Work: An Overview
A. Books
B. Articles
III. Advice for Publishing
A. Getting Accepted
1. Top reasons for rejection
2. The loophole
3. Writing replies
4. Style & format
5. Citations
6. Academic language
7. Be technical, rigorous, and confusing
8. Be longwinded
B. Where to Publish
1. Book publishers
2. Journals
C. Publishing Strategies
1. Have multiple papers
2. Getting ideas
3. Immediate resubmission
4. Books or articles?
5. The timeline
D. Writing Book Proposals
E. Becoming Famous
F. What to Expect
IV. Anecdotes from the Academic Publishing Life
V. Whats Wrong with This System?
A. Bad referees
1. Absurd delays
2. Rejection due to philosophical disagreement
3. Confusion
4. Careless reading
5. The incentive problem
6. Unpredictability
B. Incentives for bad work
1. Bad writing
2. Minor points
3. Sophistry
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4. Metadiscourse
5. Weak claims
6. Salami publications
7. Repetition
C. Uselessness to Society
1. Unwanted writings
2. Narrow scholars
3. Why are we ignored?
D. Recommendations
1. Charge for submissions
2. Pay referees
3. Use a rating scale
4. One referee is enough
5. Change the standards
6. Refereeing by editors
7. Require long abstracts
VI. Other Sources
I. About This Page

A. What is this?
This is a page of my reflections on publishing in academic philosophy. Much of it probably applies
to other academic disciplines too. It includes thoughts about such things as how one gets
published, where one should publish, what one should expect, and whats wrong with the current
system. This might be helpful to new academic philosophers, and anyway, it might be interesting.
Obvious caveat: the following remarks are my personal observations and opinions. Other
philosophers will disagree with many of them.
B. Who am I?
As of this writing, Ive been an academic philosopher for seventeen years (probably more by the
time you read this). Ive published 1 edited volume, 3 single-authored books (+1 forthcoming), 5
book reviews, and more than 50 research articles. The venues range fromPhilosophical Reviewdown
to . . . some journal you never heard of. I also referee about ten papers a year for a variety of
journals. So Ive experienced a pretty wide range of what goes on in the academic philosophy
publishing world.
Now, on to the parts you want to hear about.
II. H ow Things Work: An Overview

A. Books
If you have a book to publish, you want to prepare a book proposal. This is a summary description
of the book, which may be written either before or after the book manuscript is completed. (More
on this later.) You send the proposal & probably a sample chapter to publishers. In the case of
books, youre allowed to submit simultaneously to multiple publishers, and you should do so.
One of three things then happens:
i) Rejection: By far the most likely outcome. In my experience, sometimes the rejection comes
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quickly enough that you can infer that they didnt read through the proposal. Sometimes the
editor doesnt even respond.
ii)They ask for more material, like the complete manuscript. After you send it, they then sit on it for
several months before getting back to you. They may well reject it after making you wait for 10
months, which will make you glad you simultaneously submitted to several other publishers.
iii)They accept it. This might happen just on the strength of your proposal, if the publisher really
likes you, e.g., because youre famous, or youve published some successful books with them
before. If they dont know you, theyll probably need the whole manuscript.
Suppose you got rejected. Dont worry most things are rejected. Just keep submitting it until
someone takes it. Many editors dont know what theyre doing. Of course, its also possible that
your manuscript is bad. But you probably still want to publish it, and you probably still can just go
down to some lower-tier publisher such as Lexington.
Suppose you got accepted. They send you a contract. Note that you can negotiate any items
you see in there. If you dont like something in the contract, ask the acquisitions editor to change it.
Maybe they wont agree, but it doesnt hurt to ask.
Dont expect to make more than a pittance on your book. Royalties of 5-10% are normal for
an academic book. Those are calculated on net receipts (the amount the publisher receives, not the
retail price so if the publisher sells it to a book store for $20, then the book store sells it for $35,
then if you have 5% royalties, that means you get $1 (20*.05)).
Your book will probably appear ridiculously overpriced, e.g., priced at $50 or $80. The reason
is that your publisher doesnt think many people would buy it, except libraries, and libraries will
pay the $50. Your publisher is probably right.
After your book is published, you can try to get journals to review it, either by asking the
publisher to send a copy of your book to the journal (first make sure the journal does book
reviews) or by sending them a copy yourself (but this is expensive). However, unless youre
famous, dont expect more than a few reviews, and dont be surprised if there are zero.
After your book is published, the scholarly reaction will probably be minimal. You can put a
line on your CV, but probably no one will talk about it. Thats assuming its an average academic
book (and if you think that its well above average, youre probably just biased).
B. Articles
Unlike the case with books, simultaneous article submissions are not allowed. So you have to wait
for your paper to be rejected before sending it to the next journal.
Here is basically what you should expect: you send the paper to a journal. You get a quick
email acknowledging receipt. Then you hear nothing for three months. Maybe six months. Maybe
more. Then you get a rejection. The leading journals reject 90-95% of all submissions (and again, if
you think youre special, youre probably just biased).
It might have a referee report attached, in which case youll probably disagree with the report.
Or there might be no comments at all. (Why? I dont know, maybe the referee didnt send any
comments, or the editor didnt want to forward them. Ive never been a journal editor, so I can
only guess.) Or there might be two referee reports, in which case there is about a 50% chance that
the two referees will mostly disagree with each other.
If your paper is not rejected, most likely it will get a revise and resubmit. You should
probably do the revisions that they ask for, unless they are very extensive and onerous, because its
the best chance of getting published. Also prepare a list of revisions and responses to comments
(including explanations, for any recommended revisions that you chose not to make, of why you
did not make them). Sometimes, the requested revisions are incompatible (referee A says expand
section 2 referee B says cut section 2). After you do the revisions, they might still reject it.
Do not take six months to do the revisions do them immediately. If youre going to take half a
year, then just send it to another journal instead.
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If youve been waiting for over 3 months and havent heard anything from the journal, its
perfectly in order to write to the editor and check on the status of your manuscript. A referee
might have forgotten to read it, and they might send that person a reminder. Sometimes, you go
through multiple rounds of this. Be polite.
III. Advice for Publishing

A. Getting Accepted
1. Top reasons for rejection
Your paper is probably going to be rejected because the referee didnt like it. Here are the top
reasons for rejection:
a.Its wrong.Or: the referee disagrees with your philosophical position. Most referees have trouble
distinguishing between writing a referee report and writing a philosophical reply. In other
words, they have trouble distinguishing the question Does this make a worthwhile
contribution to the discussion? from Do you think this is correct? Their reports thus tend
to focus on giving objections to the argument of the paper. If there are many objections, the
editor will probably decide that it is a negative report and therefore reject the paper.
b.Its obviously right.The ref thinks what youve said is too obvious to need an academic paper to
say it. Sometimes, a referee thinks something is obvious even though a large portion of the
profession would reject it.
c. Its already been said. Some other philosopher defended this position, with something like this
argument, so now youre not allowed to do it.
d.Its not tied to the literature. You didnt talk about the other people whove written about this, or
there arent any such other people.
e. Its uninteresting. Occasionally, someone might think the point youre making is too small, or
merely semantic, or for some other reason not sufficiently interesting. But this seems rare this
is the only one of the top reasons that I think is underused. If you write a paper that mostly
recounts other peoples views, you should get this type of rejection.
So, to get published, you more or less need an idea that the referee thinks is likely correct, yet
notobviouslycorrect, interesting, and tied to the literature, yet hasnt been said before. That rules
out practically everything. So its almost impossible to get published.
2. The loophole
Here is the loophole: you can take a point that is so narrow and so tied to the specific course of the
recent literature that it hasnt been made before. The standards for interestingness in academia
allow very small, hyperspecialized points to count as sufficiently interesting. So thats how most
published papers get published.
3. Writing replies
Perhaps the easiest way to find a publishable idea is to take some recent publication and write a
reply to it. Choose a reasonably interesting article/book from a good journal/press, but one that
doesnt already have a million replies. But note that if you write a reply targeting one specific
article, and the journal in which the target article appears rejects your reply, then it will generally be
impossible to publish your reply anywhere else. You may therefore wish to target books rather
than articles.
This will not make you well-known it will just help to get you lines on your CV and get you
tenure. However good your reply may be, its still just a commentary on someone elses ideas.
4. Style & format

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As a long time referee for academic journals, the first thing I want to say is: proofread your damn
paper. If there are three errors on the first page, its going to look unprofessional, like maybe this is
some student paper from a not-very-good school. If you dont know how footnotes or
bibliographic entries are formatted, find out now. Anyone who wants to be an academic should
know that. If you dont see three things wrong with Smith (2007) p.15, get a style manual.
Most journals give some guidelines for formatting of submissions (double space throughout,
use single quotes for direct quotations, blah blah). However, I dont think an editor would
actually reject a paper for failing to meet these guidelines. If it gets accepted, youll just have to
reformat it at that time. Since different journals have different formatting requirements, and since
almost all submissions are rejected, it isnt really reasonable for you to format the paper specially
for submission to a particular journal. (But again, there should not be actual errors in it!)
5. Citations
Naturally, you need to read the recent literature on your topic. Cite as many things as you can. Part
of the purpose here is to prove that you are part of this social group, and that you are familiar with
the conversation as it has been going up till now.
Here is the other purpose: The editor is going to send your paper to someone who has written
on the topic. That person will probably expect to see his own work cited. If it isnt, he might feel a
negative emotion, which could bias him against your paper. Since you dont know who the referee
is going to be, just cite as many people as you can, even if the citations are not actually helpful.
The editor also might look at your bibliography for ideas of who could referee your paper. So
dont be nasty to any of the people you reference.
6. Academic language
Papers are most likely to get published if they are written in the style of other academic papers.
That style is not what I would callgoodwriting, and it is not, for instance, like the style of this page.
Dont write stuff like what youre reading now.
Academic writing tends to be boring empty of emotion, and filled with jargon, multiple
qualifications, unnecessarily long and complex sentences, technical sounding phrases, meta
discussions about the state of the discussion, and digressions into small side points. The good news
is, if youre an academic, you probably already know how to do this. (A clear, engaging style takes
more work, but luckily, you wont have to learn that.) Youll need to study the literature on your
topic to identify the specific jargon people are using in that area, the other people theyre referring
to, and their current preoccupations.
Academic writing is a specific kind of bad writing. (Not just any badness will do e.g., dont
misspell words, contradict yourself, or compose incoherent sentences.) Steven Pinker discusses it
in his essay, Why Academics Stink at Writing. Here is a typical academic sentence, taken from
the methods section of an experimental psychology paper: Participants read assertions whose
veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.
Pinker was able to figure out what this meant: Participants read sentences, each followed by the
wordtrueorfalse.
Why do we engage in this kind of bad writing? Im not sure, but I have some hypotheses (see
the Pinker essay for more). First hypothesis: we think this kind of bad writing sounds smart.
Even sophisticated intellectuals can be fooled into thinking that a simple idea is something
sophisticated when it is presented in sufficiently convoluted, jargony prose. On the other side, we
can be fooled into thinking that a well-crafted and profound argument is superficial and silly if it is
presented in plain language. Since we want to convince readers that we are smart, we surround
our ideas with a thicket of obfuscatory prose. However, a colleague has pointed me to this
psychological study, which suggests that using overly complex language actually makes one appear
dumber: Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with
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Using Long Words Needlessly.

Second, when referees read a paper, they judge it by whether it seems typical of the other
things theyve seen published in the journals. That judgment is going to be influenced not just by
the ideas expressed, but by whether the prosereads likethe sort of prose found in those journals.
Since most academics are terrible writers, you need to be bad in the same way in order to fit in.
(This doesnt explain how the bad writing got started, but it helps sustain the practice.)
Third, there are some serious intellectual reasons for some aspects of the academic writing
style. For instance, precision often requires adding qualifications or using unfamiliar words. Making
progress on well-discussed issues often requires going into fine detail. And a detached style can
help parties to a debate remain objective, reducing the biases caused by personal emotions. I think
that explainssomeof why academic prose is hard to read. But it doesnt explain, e.g., such sentences
as Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent
presentation of an assessment word. That really is not more precise or informative than
Participants read sentences, each followed by the wordtrueorfalse.
I think a fourth factor is involved: most academics are timid people. Academic prose is
enervated because language that is direct, forceful, or passionate makes us uncomfortable.
Academic language might put people to sleep, but at least it wont make anyone uncomfortable.
To maximize your chances of getting accepted, then, youll want to avoid upsetting anyone or
making anyone uncomfortable. A good rule is: imagine that the philosopher whom you are most
directly arguing against is your referee. This is a good rule because theres a fair chance that that
personwill in factbe the referee. (Editors seem to think its fine to have person X referee a paper
about X.) So be as fair and generous as possible to your philosophical opponents. You might even
want to praise them.
7. Be technical, rigorous, and confusing

Referees look for reasons to reject a paper, not reasons to accept. And because they are confused,
their reasons for rejection are often of the form, I think this paper is wrong because X. To avoid
rejection, you want to write something where it is hard for the referee to say it iswrong. If it features
technical arguments, especially mathematical or formal logical manipulations, it should be
impossible for the referee to claim you are wrong in those parts (assuming the technical arguments
are in fact technically correct).
In addition, if the referee has trouble following the argument, hell find it difficult to say youre
wrong. (He also wont know that youreright, but again, referees are looking for reasons to reject,
not reasons to accept.) Thats another advantage of obfuscatory prose, as long as the referee
doesnt think that the reason hes having trouble following is that your text doesnt actually make
sense.
It might seem that my advice here is hypocritical I never try to add obfuscatory prose myself. I
have, however, relied on mathematical and formal logical arguments. The first paper I got intoPhil
Reviewfeatured a fair amount of formal logical manipulations. The paper I got intoJ Philfeatured a
bunch of probability theory, including proofs of two probabilistic theorems in the appendices. I
think the technical nature of these papers helped make it possible to get them into top journals.
8. Be longwinded
If you make a point too quickly, referees will think it must be superficial. Thus, you need to add a
bunch of discussion, even if its not actually helpful. If you discuss some misunderstandings of
your point, and some bad reasons why someone might disagree with it, itll give the referee more
confidence, even if those misunderstandings and bad reasons arent things he would have been
tempted by. For this reason, it may help to discuss your idea with other philosophers.
B. Where to Publish
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1. Book publishers
The following list is fromBrian Leiters blog(2/5/2013). Its the result of Leiters survey on what
people think are the best presses for academic philosophy. In order from best to worst:
1Oxford University Press
2Cambridge University Press
3Harvard University Press
4Routledge (Taylor & Francis)
5Princeton University Press
6MIT Press
7Wiley-Blackwell
8University of Chicago Press
9Hackett Publishing
10Yale University Press
11Cornell University Press
12Columbia University Press
13Palgrave Macmillan
14Springer
15Continuum
16Rowman & Littlefield
17Polity Press
18Ashgate
19Edinburgh University Press
20McGill-Queens University Press
21Broadview
22Indiana Univ Press
?Open Court (overlooked in initial survey, so we dont know where it would have ranked)
?Brill (same problem)
How much does this matter? I think it makes no difference to how well your book will be
produced the books from all these presses are about equally professional. It probably makes some
difference to your ability to get tenure, particularly if you are at a highly-ranked research school a
book from one of the top ten or so presses sounds much better than a book from one of the last
ten, or a press not even on this list. (But if youre not at a leading research school, you probably
neednt worry about it.) The top presses will also get more libraries to buy your book.
What about getting people to read and talk about your book? My guess is that the press makes
little difference to that, and that for the most part, academic books are just not going to be talked
about to anything like the degree their authors want, no matter what press publishes them. There
are a small number of exceptions, but you probably should ignore those exceptions and just
assume that your book is going to be one of the thousands of largely ignored academic books. And
if you think that youre special, you should probably assume that youre one of the thousands of
academics who thinks theyre special but who will never be recognized as such by the profession.
2. Journals
Another ranking from Brian Leiters blog (7/6/2013). This is based on Leiters survey of what
people considered the best philosophy journals. In order from best to worst:
1Philosophical Review
2Journal of Philosophy
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3Nous
4Mind
5Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
6Ethics
7Philosophical Studies
8Australasian Journal of Philosophy
9Philosophers Imprint
10Analysis
11Philosophical Quarterly
12Philosophy & Public Affairs
13Philosophy of Science
14British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
15Synthese
16Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
17Erkenntnis
18American Philosophical Quarterly
19Canadian Journal of Philosophy
20Journal of the History of Philosophy
21Journal of Philosophical Logic
22Mind & Language
23Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
24European Journal of Philosophy
25British Journal for the History of Philosophy
I suspect that this ranking has at most a modest correlation with the actual quality of articles
published in these journals. I think the review process is largely random, and the journals with
high standards are mostly just those that randomly reject a larger number of submissions.
Be that as it may, the ranking really reflects the prestige of the journals, and this profession is
incredibly prestige-driven. Your paper is much, much more likely to be read if it appears in one of
the top 4 journals than otherwise. (But either way, most philosophy papers will be read only by a
small number of specialists. I suspect that many are read by no one.)
However, the top journals are also more likely to reject your paper, thus wasting your time. I
would guess that a top journal is half as likely (or less) to accept your paper as a mid-ranked
journal. They just reject practically everything. (For this purpose, count Ethics and Philosophy and
Public Affairsamong the top journals.) So youll have to weigh that in deciding where to submit. If
youre under time pressure (e.g., for going on the job market, or going up for tenure), I would
bypass the top journals.
Of course the ones listed above are not the only journals or book publishers theyre just the ones
listed by Leiter. I dont have a complete list. If youre considering a journal/publisher not on the
lists, its probably one of lesser prestige than the ones on the list. (Leiter would tend to think of all
the high-prestige ones.)
C. Publishing Strategies
1. Have multiple papers
The profession rewards quantity. You need a certain quantity to get tenure, and to impress other
people. Of course, you want high quality too, but Im not going to tell you how to
dogoodphilosophy thats too big of a topic. Ill just comment on quantity.
The first (obvious) thing: write multiple papers. Do not, e.g., focus on just one paper for six
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months, and do not wait until you get your first paper published to start working on the second.
Rather, have multiple papers under submission at once. When one is sent off, forget about it (for
now) and start work on the next one.
2. Getting ideas
How are you going to get ideas for multiple papers? Well, I cant tell you how to have interesting
ideas. But one thing you could try is to read some prominent recent papers, and see if you disagree
with them. If so, you can write replies.
3. Immediate resubmission
Okay, now this obvious point is important: When you get back your rejection, do not dawdle
around for three months, reworking the paper, or thinking about reworking it, or wondering
whether its worth publishing. Just send it out again.
What about revising in light of referee comments? Well, if you actually agree with some of the
comments, you should probably revise in light of them, if you are really going to do so within a few
months. If not, just send the paper out again immediately. Same day. But wont the paper be
rejected by the next referee for the same reasons? No, probably not. Referee objections are
mostly idiosyncratic the next referee will probably make complaints completely unrelated to
those of the previous referee.
At least, thats been my experience maybe yours will differ. If more than one person makes the
same complaint about your paper, then you should address it.
4. Books or articles?
If you have a book-length idea, I suggest writing a book rather than a series of articles. For one
thing, it is a lot more hassle to get 8 articles published than to get 1 book published. For another,
people seem to pay more attention to books (read: at least a little bit of attention). My published
articles have a greater total volume than my books, but my books have gotten much more
attention. This might be because there are thousands and thousands of articles published every
year, but not nearly as many books.
5. The timeline
If you want to have an article or book published by yearx(for example, because youre going up
for tenure), you basically need it to be finished in yearx-2 at the latest, preferably yearx-3. Yes, its
really going to take 2-3 years. Once its submitted, you should expect the journal to hold it for 3
months or more before rejecting it. Then youll send it out again, etc. On average, I get 3 or 4
rejections for every one acceptance, and journals take 3-6 months to review a paper. (But note that
the rejection rates of top journals are 90-95%, so things might be even worse than the preceding
comments suggest.) Once your paper is finally accepted, itll take 1-2 years for it to appear.
There are large unpredictable variations here a journal might take a year to review your paper
before rejecting it, and a paper might go through six rejections before being accepted. So you could
easily wind up taking four years to get a paper published. Thus, you really cant start early enough
on getting things published.
D. Writing Book Proposals
Maybe you shouldnt listen to me, since Ive received dozens of book rejections. But here is what I
would include in a book proposal:
An overview describing what the book says
Expected length (in words)
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Expected completion date, and current progress

Table of contents, with abstracts of chapters
Why this book is important or valuable
The competition other books on the subject, and something about how your book is
different from/better than them. This is dumb, but publishers ask for it.
Audience is this for professional philosophers, students, scholars in other disciplines, etc.?
Biographical note something about who you are, where you are, & other work youve done.
Total length: about 5 pages. I would send this to several editors, offering to send sample chapters
or the whole manuscript if they are interested.
E. Becoming Famous
First of all, youre not going to become famous. Just accept that. If you wanted fame, you chose
the wrong profession. (Then again, theres no right profession for that youre not going to become
famous no matter what you do. Unless you become some incredibly heinous criminal that still
works, thanks to the news media.)
However, you may have a chance to become slightly well-known. Here is how to maximize the
chances of that:
Publish a lot.This isnt sufficient, but it appears to be necessary I dont know of any prominent
philosopher who published little. Whats a lot? Lets say at least two articles a year, preferably
more.
Have big ideas.If you publish papers on highly specialized topics, theyll only be read by a small
number of specialists, so its not that great, even if there are a lot of these papers. Try to pick a
fairly central issue, and write a book defending a big theory about it, so that you can be cited by
many people.
Take an unusual position. For example, if youre the only person defending infinitism in
epistemology (the idea that beliefs are justified by an infinite regress of reasons), then everyone
who talks about the regress problem will have to cite you you win! So if you have views that
are really unpopular, focus on defending those first.
Network.Go to conferences and talk to many people. You could also try writing to people who
work on things that youre interested in, but be prepared to be ignored.
Have style. The advice for maximizing your chances of getting published is almost the opposite
of the advice for maximizing the odds of people actually reading your work once its published.
If you write in a boring, technical, hard-to-follow style, youre more likely to get published, but
few will want to read it (exception: if your name is Rawls). If you manage to get something
thats actually well-written published, then more people will read it. They might even assign it
for classes.
F. What to Expect
Suppose you do everything I suggested under (E). What can you expect? You should probably
expect to become somewhat well-known, after ten or twenty years. Maybe after twenty years, youll
reach a citation count between 100 and 400 on Google scholar. These days, given the sheer volume
of academic writing, and the number of scholars, it is virtually impossible to become famous (e.g.,
on the level of Frankfurt, who has 3,000 citations for his top publication). Writing good work
doesnt do it, because you simply cant get people to read it in the first place. It was much easier if
you started fifty years ago.
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Furthermore, most of the citations to your work will be extremely superficial they will just
cite you as an example of a person who holds viewX, where X is the most general, superficial
characterization possible of your view. Even if you wrote a book containing dozens of arguments
for different, interesting theses, still, people will only talk about one very generic idea in it. But you
wont be able to blame anyone for any of this, because youll be doing the same thing when you
reference other peoples work.
Many people will vaguely know who you are but not actually have read anything of yours.
IV. Anecdotes from the Academic Publishing Life

Here are some amusing anecdotes about my experiences as an academic author and referee. You
might experience similar things, in which case perhaps youll be comforted to know that youre not
alone.
I have on more than one occasion waited for more than a year for a decision from a journal. I
usually send followup queries after a few months, and they say, Still working on it. The record
was theJournal of Philosophy, to which I first submitted a paper in March of 2006. After one round
of revisions, that paper was eventually accepted in August of 2010, and published in the January
2011 issue (I use scare quotes, because that issue actually appeared several months late). The
revisions took me one month the remainder of thefour and a half yearswas review time. (I think they
forgot about the ms. or something.)
On one occasion, my paper was rejected not only in spite of, but actually, in a way,because ofthe
fact that I made the revisions requested by the referees. The referees suggested adding discussion
of multiple different issues, which I did. The editor sent it back to them for re-review. One of the
two referees responded positively to the revision, but the other never responded. After a few
months, the editor decided to reject the paper because it was too long . . . which was true because
Id added these things the referees asked for.
My second and third books were each rejected by over a dozen publishers. Both were
eventually accepted by Palgrave Macmillan and then became prominent contributions to their
fields, selling much better than most academic books. Lesson: many editors dont know what
theyre doing. One editor said it wasnt clear who the audience forEthical Intuitionismwas, because
it was about a very academic topic, but the writing style was not very academic. The editor
complained that, for example, one sentence in the first chapter was the single word, No. Some
of the publishers never responded to my query others rejected it without soliciting any academic
advice. Only two publishers actually sent the ms. ofEthical Intuitionismout for review.
For one book, I submitted the ms. to Oxford. They asked me to hold off for a month on
submitting it to other publishers, which I did. Then I submitted it to other publishers. Cambridge
was going to review it, but when they learned that Id sent it to Oxford a month earlier, they
refused to review it. Then Oxford never finished their review. I wrote to the editor twice to follow
up he never responded.
Ive received many comments from referees that just seemed completely wrong. Sometimes,
the reviewer seems confused or bad at reasoning, even to the point of incompetence. Other times,
it seems as though the reader did not read the paper carefully at all. Other times, the reviewer
seems to be a dogmatist who rejects the paper because he disagrees with it. (Most philosophers are
really surprisingly dogmatic.)
One of my papers was rejected over fifteen times before I gave up. Every time, the reason
given was that the referee disagreed with the argument, but no two referees agreed on
exactlywhatwas wrong with the argument. I kept adding sections explaining why such-and-such
objection was wrong, but the referees would just invent new spurious objections. In one case, I
sent a message back to the editor, explaining the errors in the referee report (e.g., referee said I
never definedx I quote where I defined it). The editor agreed to some extent that the report
was factually wrong, but this of course didnt make any difference. Theyll never overlook a
negative referee report, however incompetent the report is.
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negative referee report, however incompetent the report is.

On the other side, I once wrote a referee report, and then the editor forwarded to me an angry
message from the author about how Id misunderstood the paper. It turned out that Id overlooked
a not in a sentence, or something like that, thus ascribing to the author the opposite of his view
on a particular point. The angry message didnt convince me that the paper was any good, though,
so I ignored it.
V. Whats Wrong with This System?

A. Bad referees
You may have gotten the impression by now that I am not overwhelmed by the charms of the
academic publishing world. The first category of failure in this system is poor quality refereeing.
What I have in mind here is . . .
1. Absurd delays
I.e., referees who sit on a paper for several months before looking at it, or sit on it for several
months and never look at it, and maybe never respond to the editors queries. This is extremely
inconsiderate and unprofessional. Some of these authors are trying to get publications out before
they come up for tenure. Youre not only failing to help by holding on to it, youre preventing
them from getting their paper reviewed by anyone else.
Waiting for 3 months before looking at a paper does not make it take less time to read. Why is
it that when you get forty student papers, you can grade them in a couple of weeks, but it takes 3
months, or 6 months, or maybe a couple of years, to read a journal submission?
Now, you might think, It takes more time to read a journal submission, because you have to
give comments. No, thats not it. It might actually takemoretime to read student papers, because
they tend to be much worse, and its harder to read bad papers. Anyway, theres no way that a
journal submission takes, say, fifty times longer than a student term paper. We can get through a
dozen grad student term papers, or a few dozen (shorter) undergrad papers, in a week or two.
Referees just choose to sit on the journal submissions because they dont give a damn about the
author or the journal.
Recommendation: if youre not going to read the paper within a month, tell the editor you cant
do it. If youre an editor, give the referees about a month. If they dont do it by then, send it to
someone else. Then post on the internet the name of the referee who promised you a review and
didnt do it.
2. Rejection due to philosophical disagreement

I.e., referees who reject a paper because they disagree with it, on controversial philosophical
grounds. Now, sometimes a paper should be rejected because the argument is no good. But that
doesnt just mean any argument that you think is mistaken. If the argument is one that some
intelligent and reasonable philosophers would find plausible, then that should be good enough.
Of course, with that weak standard, many more papers would be accepted . . . but the journals
dont have enough room for more papers. Solution: more papers should be rejected for reason (e)
under III.A.1: uninterestingness. I would like to see more controversial arguments, but fewer
semantic arguments, fewer small technical points, fewer meta arguments about the state of the
discussion or the relationship between so-and-sos theory and some other theory.
Some referees are dogmatic theyll say some point youve made is obviously wrong, where its
a point that in fact many competent philosophers would endorse. This happens mostly in ethics
and political philosophy. Example: if you think either that utilitarianism is ridiculous, or that
deontological ethics is ridiculous, then youre a dogmatist. You need to either stop refereeing
papers or learn to suspend your dogmatic beliefs when refereeing. Both utilitarianism and (various
forms of) deontology are reasonable starting points for a philosophical paper. The profession
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doesnt know which of these views (if either) is correct, so its worthwhile to work out implications
of either view. (But an author shouldnotjust assume some very idiosyncratic, controversial variant
of either of these views.)
When refereeing a paper, the question to ask is not, Is this convincing? The question is,
Does this add to the discussion? Would people like to talk about it?
3. Confusion
Some referees just seem to be bad at philosophy they get confused about the argument, or they
make obviously bad objections (which could be easily answered, but the author never gets the
chance to answer them, because the paper just gets rejected). Im still not sure why this is. Im not
sure if it is because there are many philosophers who are bad at philosophy, or because journals
wind up asking people to referee papers who shouldnt be doing so (e.g., someone who doesnt
know much about the area, who is just starting out in the profession, or who is from a nonresearch school).
I suspect the problem might be that the leading figures in an area keep refusing referee
requests, maybe because they get too many requests, because they have too many other things to
do, and/or because they dont like refereeing and figure theyve achieved enough status to not have
to do things they dont like. So then the editors send the paper to minor figures or unknown
figures. Apropos of which, I started getting referee requests very early in my career, before I was
known as an expert on anything. I think it started in my very first year as a professor.
4. Careless reading
Sometimes, it just seems that the referee hasnt read the paper carefully e.g., hes misunderstood
the paper in a way that should not happen if one were paying attention. He thinks you meant
something that you explicitly ruled out, he raises an objection that you refuted and doesnt seem to
know that you did so, etc.
5. The incentive problem

I think the problem of bad referees is caused or exacerbated by an incentive problem: there is little
incentive to do a good job as a referee. There are two aspects of this. First, refereeing is doubleblind: the referees identity is not revealed to anyone other than the editor. (The authors identity is
also secret, unless and until the paper is published.) If you knew that your referee report was going
to be attributed to you, you might read the paper carefully, think carefully before raising objections,
and try to finish in a reasonable time.
Second, refereeing is strictly pro bono. Youre paid nothing for it, so rather than feeling a duty
to the author and the editor to do a good job, you feel like youre doing them a favor by doing
anything at all. If they wind up thinking you did a crappy job, the author cant do anything, and the
worst the editor might do is stop asking you to referee things . . . which youd probably actually
prefer. So really, the incentive is to do a crappy job.
6. Unpredictability
There is no consensus in the profession on what is good work. Obviously, many things will be
generally agreed to be bad. But very little is generally agreed to be good, and the same paper often
draws extremely disparate evaluations. After many years in the profession, it seems to me that
referee decisions are mostly random. One referees report is no predictor of another referees
report one journals decision is no predictor of anothers.
B. Incentives for bad work
Lets move on to how the system is set up to produce lots of low-quality work. It makes good
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work hard to publish and creates incentives to write bad work.
1. Bad writing
Ive already discussed the incentives to write badly (sections III.A.6-8), using jargon-filled,
convoluted, obfuscatory prose with unnecessary technical digressions. This happens because its
more important to convince the referee that youre smart and that he cant say youre wrong,
than it is to make anyone enjoy your paper or feel enlightened or stimulated by it.
2. Minor points
Ive also indicated the incentives for writing papers with uninteresting theses. Most interesting
ideas have already been discussed at great length. To continue to say new things, we must divide
our fields into increasingly specialized, tiny subfields. If a point hasnt been made before as far as
the editors or referees know, out of hundreds of thousands of published philosophy papers and
books, then the chances are pretty good that thats because few people have thought about the
question the point is about which is a pretty good indication that it is not a very interesting or
important thing to think about. This is part of why academic research is about increasingly trivial
things. As economists would say, the low-hanging fruit has been picked.
3. Sophistry
Of course, there are exceptions much research is still being done on important questions. But
again, there is the constraint that one must say something new. Now, if youre advancing an idea
that has never been advanced before, despite that many smart people have spent a great deal of
time discussing the very issue youre interested in, then theres a pretty good chance that the reason
the idea has not been advanced is that its so clearly false that no one could believe it, or no one
could think of a way to defend it. If you can be the first to come up with a way of defending
something generally considered obviously false, then there are great rewards for you. You can get
published, you can stir up discussion and make a name for yourself.
But if something is generally considered obviously false, and if no one till now could think of a
way to defend it, thats a pretty good indication that the idea is in fact false. So we have a system
that rewards sophistry: clever ways of defending what is obviously false.
4. Metadiscourse
Academic articles contain a good deal of metadiscourse: discussion about the discussion (e.g.,
about the taxonomy of theories, about the state of the debate, about whether so-and-so could
accept such-and-such view, about whether defenders ofXism should be sympathetic toYism). It
also contains (is this also metadiscourse?) a good deal of discussion by one author about another
authors ideas papers responding to As defense ofXism against Bs objections, and so on. This
is much less interesting than discussion directly about the primary philosophical issues. For
instance, a paper that tries to convince you that we have free will is more interesting than a paper
that tries to convince you that people who support such-and-such theory about free will should be
not unsympathetic to so-and-sos theory about causation. Again, this relatively uninteresting
metadiscourse is partly the result of the demand to constantly say new things.
5. Weak claims
The fear of saying things a referee will disagree with (since disagreement on the referees part is the
primary cause of rejection) also leads us to qualify and otherwise weaken our claims as much as
possible, consistent with still sayingsomething. This makes our claims uninteresting, but since its
much more common for a referee to reject a paper because he disagrees with it than for a referee
to reject a paper because the thesis isnt bold enough, the incentive is to accept that tradeoff.
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One of my favorite examples, from a recent book: My speculations on this score are at best
the roughest approximations to the truth. Still, I try sketching a naturalistic picture of human
normative life, and enough in it coheres and fits the phenomena to make me think the truth may
lie somewhere in its vicinity. Notice that the first sentence is so qualified that it not only fails
to assert that the authors theory is true it actually entails that the theory is definitely false. The
passage suggests that the authors view is probably not even close to the truth.
6. Salami publications
Because the profession rewards quantity, but people have only so many ideas, the incentive is to
slice ones ideas into the smallest publishable pieces. Rather than packing as much content into a
paper as one can, one puts in as little as one can get away with.
7. Repetition
For the same reason, we tend to publish the same idea repeatedly. If you have two ideas, but you
need ten publications to get tenure . . . just publish your two ideas five times each, with tiny
variations.
C. Uselessness to Society
1. Unwanted writings
The philosophy publication system is also pretty much useless to society, where it seems to me that
one might reasonably have hoped for something useful. Quite a bit of intellectual talent and energy
is being channeled into producing thousands upon thousands of papers and books that hardly
anyone will ever read or want to read. These articles and books are written almost entirely for other
academics working in the same sub-sub-sub-specialization that the author works in. The main
reason they are written is so that the author can get tenure or otherwise get credit for publishing.
The main reason they are read even by the tiny number of people who read them is so that the
readers can cite those articles in their own articles.
Some years ago, I looked up statistics on how much philosophy was being published. At the
time, the Philosophers Index (which indexed most articles and books in the English-speaking
world) was getting 14,000 new records per year. The number has probably expanded greatly since
then. PhilPapers presently lists 646 new records this week. What proportion of those books and
articles could the average philosopher possibly read?
In my years in the profession, I have read many papers. Almost none of them were read for the
purpose of my learning anything interesting from them. Most were read solely so that I could give
an evaluation to them as in the case of student papers, which are written solely to be graded and
then are generally thrown away or journal submissions, which one reads solely so that one can say
whether they should be published. My guess is that Ive read more journal submissions as a referee
than Ive read published papers as a scholar.
When the main reason why people doxis so that someone else can evaluate their ability to
dox, it seems to me that something has gone wrong.
2. Narrow scholars
Most academics have very narrow intellectual horizons. Becoming an academicgreatly narrowsones
intellectual field of view, actuallypreventingone from learning, thinking about, or discussing many
interesting things that one might otherwise have learned and discussed.
How so? In order to get published, one must stay current with the literature in ones field. In
most cases, that literature is enormous and constantly growing. So, to phrase matters in economic
terms, there is a very largefixed costto publishing in a given area. That fixed cost discourages one
from doing work in new areas and encourages one to remain in the area one is already familiar
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with. The narrower the area, the easier it is to learn enough to publish there. So the system creates
a collection of extremely narrow scholars, who know next to nothing about, and have almost
nothing to say about, anything outside their tiny areas of specialization.
Furthermore, the time demands of staying current in ones own field are significant enough to
crowd out general interest reading. Its not that one literally has no time to read other books for
general interest. Its just that most people have a limited appetite for nonfiction reading, and it is
more than filled doing the reading necessary to stay current in ones field. So philosophers in one
field typically know very little even about other branchesof philosophy to say nothing of natural
science, psychology, economics, etc.
The same problem affects scholars in other fields. But the situation is especially unfortunate
for philosophers, because philosophy is, of all disciplines, the one that ought most to take in the
big picture.
3. Why are we ignored?

Sometimes, philosophers lament our low profile in society. For instance, lets say someone decides
to have a discussion on TV of the ethics of cloning. They invite a couple of doctors, a politician,
and a priest. No philosopher.
Not always, of course sometimes, philosophersareinvited to things like this. But fairly often,
when obviously philosophical issues are being discussed, people dont even think to consult
philosophers. (What if there was a public discussion of global warming, and they forgot to invite
any climate scientists?)
There are probably a variety of reasons for this. One reason is that we have an irrational
educational system, in which people can complete sixteen years of study without ever being
exposed to some of the most central questions in the history of human thought and what the great
thinkers have said about those questions.
But at least some of the blame has to fall on the philosophical profession itself. For the reasons
discussed above, most philosophical writing is incredibly boring to most people. You cant blame a
television producer for not inviting someone from a profession that produces such fare.
D. Recommendations
You probably wont like my suggestions, and theres almost no chance that theyll be adopted. But
here they are anyway.
1. Charge for submissions

Some journals (but none in philosophy that I know of) charge authors a fee to submit their papers.
Philosophy journals should start doing that. Not a large fee, not enough to make publishing
unaffordable to anyone. Something like $25. I think this would cut down on frivolous submissions,
cases where the author hasnt put much effort into the paper and just decides to send off a paper
she did for a seminar, because theres no cost to it and maybe shell get some comments on it. This
proposal would also help to implement the next proposal.
2. Pay referees
Book publishers commonly pay referees, but journals do not. Journals should start paying too. It
neednt be a lot maybe $25, maybe $50. This might make referees feel that they have an obligation
to the editor to put in some effort, since theyve accepted a job, rather than just doing a favor for
the journal.
3. Use a rating scale

Journals ask referees for a verdict: accept, reject, or revise and resubmit. (Some give more finedata:text/htmlcharset=utf-8,%3Cp%20style%3D%22margin-top%3A%200px%3B%20margin-bottom%3A%201px%3B%20color%3A%20rgb(0%2C%2
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grained options, like major revisions vs. minor revisions.) Instead, they should ask the referee
toratethe paper on some scale say, a scale of 1 to 10 (with fractional ratings like 8.1 allowed).
This is more informative and would enable editors to make more rational cutoff decisions when
they get too many publishable papers.
4. One referee is enough

Asking two different people to referee each paper, as most journals seem to be doing, is too much.
Theyre probably doing this because theyre trying to cut down on acceptances by requiring
positive reports from both referees.
The first problem is that this is basically screening out controversial (and therefore interesting)
papers, because most rejections are due to referee disagreement. A paper that both referees
endorse is not better than a paper that one referee supports and the other opposes it is merely less
controversial.
The second problem is that this practice is basically doubling the workload on the community
of referees. As a result, it becomes far more difficult to find people to referee a paper. By asking so
many people to referee for them,Phil Review, say, is making it harder for every other journal to find
referees. And as a result of that, journals have to go further down their list of potential referees,
meaning that they must rely on less suitable referees. When you require two referee reports, youre
harming the entire profession.
5. Change the standards

Referees need to be explicitly instructed on what they are supposed to rate. They shouldnot rate
papers based on whether they think the paper is right. Nor should they focus on how new the
idea is. Rather, they should be rating the paper on criteria such as Would this stimulate
discussion?, Would readers like to read this?, and How important is this idea?
Referees who cant get this and insist on writing reports focused on whether they agree with
the paper should not be asked to referee in the future.
The questions asked of referees could include How well-written is this paper? Obviously, no
paper should be published merely for being well-written. But writing quality could at least be one
factor considered (keeping in mind that there are many more qualified papers than journals have
space for). If this were done, then perhaps philosophers would make more effort to develop
writing skill.
6. Refereeing by editors
The above suggestions assume that we stick to the current system of selecting referees i.e.,
making an ad hoc arrangement, for each individual submission, to get someone with no particular
connection to the journal to referee the submission.
This is a terrible idea. The referee has no stake in the quality of the refereeing. Since the journal
uses many different referees, what the journal will publish is unpredictable its a matter of which
referee you happen to draw. And there is little difference in what one should expect from different
journals, since they all have more or less the same pool of referees.
Instead, most refereeing should be done by the editor, or a small editorial board.
Problem: the editorial board may not have the expertise to referee every paper. Solution: in
special cases, they could send out a paper to an outside expert, but this should be a minority of
cases. Alternate solution: journals could just publish in those areas where the editors have
expertise.
Second problem: the editors dont have time to review all the submissions. Solution: see below.
7. Require long abstracts
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When submitting a paper to a journal, the author should have to submit a long abstract, say, 2
pages. In those two pages, the author must convince the editor that there is an interesting idea and
that the editor will want to read the rest of the paper. Otherwise, it gets rejected. Unlike the case
with most actual abstracts, the long abstract should reveal the basics of the authors argument.
These suggestions will not fix all the problems Ive noted above. But theyre the best I can think of
now. At least they would make some improvement on some of the problems.
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7.11.

I. About This Page

II. H ow Things Work: An Overview

III. Advice for Publishing

4. Style & format

Using Long Words Needlessly.

7. Be technical, rigorous, and confusing

Expected completion date, and current progress

IV. Anecdotes from the Academic Publishing Life

negative referee report, however incompetent the report is.

V. Whats Wrong with This System?

2. Rejection due to philosophical disagreement

5. The incentive problem

work hard to publish and creates incentives to write bad work.

3. Why are we ignored?

1. Charge for submissions

3. Use a rating scale

4. One referee is enough

5. Change the standards

7. Require long abstracts

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