Jussi Suikkanen's Short Guide to Publishing as a Philosophy Postgrad

Jussi Suikkanen, lecturer at the University of Birmingham, has kindly provided the BPPA with a short guide to publishing as a philosophy postgrad:


A Short Guide to Publishing as a Philosophy Post-Graduate Student

In this short guide to publishing as a philosophy PG student, I want to share some of my own experiences and some of the advice that I was given when I was a post-graduate student. It is worthwhile to emphasise that there is already a lot of very useful information on this topic online. Aidan McClynn runs a website that has a comprehensive list of links to the main resources on postgraduate publishing in philosophy. It is available HERE. I recommend going through those links. I also want to emphasise how important it is to talk to your supervisor and other members of staff at your department about your publishing plans. But here are few comments I want to make myself:

1. The competition on the job-markets is very severe. Because of this, getting a job in philosophy is incredibly difficult. For this reason, in order to get even a temporary teaching job in philosophy, you are often required to have at least one or two decent publications. It used to be thought that, if you came from a top department where you had shown enough ‘promise’, you would not need any publications to get a job. In fact, it was thought that publications too early in your career might even work against you. This no longer seems to be the case.

2. With publications, quality is much more important than quantity. You do not need tens of publications but rather only one or two good ones. Also, where you publish can be incredibly important. A publication in a good journal will put you ahead of many others on the markets, whereas a publication in a low quality journal can positively harm your career. This is because potential employers will judge your future potential on the basis of your publications. Publishing in a good journal will show that you can do good research, whereas, if you publish in less prestigious journals, this will be taken to mean that you might not be able to do any better in the future.
Different philosophers will have slightly different opinions about which journals are good and which ones are to be avoided. Here’s a very rough guide. The European Science Foundation holds a fairly comprehensive list of philosophy journals HERE (just click ‘go to lists’ and add ‘philosophy’ for the subject). The journals that get INT1 are good philosophical journals. The ones that get INT2 are a more of a mixed bag. So, if you are thinking of publishing in those, talk to your supervisor first. The ones marked NAT are national journals that will not count for much.

3. It’s worthwhile to note that there are many different kinds of texts that you can publish. The main category is original research articles which tend to be between 6000 and 10000 words long (even if some journals also accept shorter or longer articles). These articles are most important with respect to getting a job. Yet, you can also publish other kinds of texts. For instance, book reviews and short critical notices are also a good way to get a sense of what publishing in philosophy is like (even if they will help you less on the job-markets). And, in some cases, PG students have turned their PhD dissertations into publishable books.

4. At this point, unfortunately, I have to make it clear that publishing in philosophical journals is very difficult. The journals get hundreds of manuscripts yearly from both professional philosophers and PG students. Most journals publish only about 5% to 10% of these manuscripts. This means that the competition for space is fierce and many good manuscripts get rejected. The referees are often just looking for excuses for rejecting. Many manuscripts go through a whole round of submissions and rejections before they are finally accepted. So, to summarise, everyone gets rejections, and the rejections we all get tend to hurt. However, despite this, you should be persistent. You should also always use the comments from the referees to improve your manuscript.

5. So, how can you maximise your chances of getting published? First of all, it is important that you read the journals in which you want to publish. By doing so, you will get a sense of what the journals and referees are looking for. Referees and journals tend to play it fairly safe. The work they accept has to be professional in the way it is written, researched, and presented. The only way in which to get a sense of what this requires is to read a lot of the previously published articles.

6. Secondly, good philosophical papers that do get published are often argumentative and clear. This means that they attempt to convince their readers of interesting conclusions by presenting new strong arguments for them. By doing so, they make a significant contributions to undergoing philosophical debates about issues that matter. These uninformative platitudes have two important consequences. Firstly, before you attempt to take part in a philosophical debate in publications, you will need to do research to find out what has happened in the debate so far. Secondly, even if you were right that philosopher X makes a mistake in the fourth step of his argument for whateverism, this is might not lead to a publication unless you can explain why this flaw matters in the larger debate. Even if you write a negative paper attacking some argument or a position, it is worthwhile to explain what we can learn as a result.

7. Finally, getting to a stage in which your manuscript is publishable is almost always a social process. Few people can complete articles on their own. Instead, most papers are revised many times on the basis of comments from others. Because of this, it is important that you present your papers at seminars and conferences, that you give them to your friends to comment on, and that you get feedback from you supervisors and other philosophers you know (in exchange you will of course need to promise to read their papers too). Others will always be able to spot weak points and flaws from your papers, and they will tell you what objections you would need to address. So, the more times you let others to comment on your work and the more times you rewrite your paper on the basis those comments, the more polished and professional you will be able to make it. And, the comments will always help you to improve your paper even if they are based on misunderstandings. At the very least, you will be able to help the reader not to misunderstand you in those ways. So, keep in mind that, if your paper is not good enough for your peers and supervisors, then it is unlikely that the referees of the journals will be any more sympathetic.

Jussi Suikkanen