Some perspective on publishing strategies, for those of us not Harvard bound

Eric's post on publishing strategies was excellent in my opinion.  I thought almost all the suggestions were good ones. (I might suggest just leaving the nasty footnote out, rather than inserting it late, but clearly that was tongue-in-cheek.)  Here I wanted to throw out a couple thoughts about keeping publishing in perspective, what with the ramp-up of application season and the growing obsession with graduate student publishing that I perceive to be overtaking the field.  (I don't take it that I'm disagreeing with Eric here.) 

The first thing to emphasize is that publishing is just one thing you need to accomplish in graduate school.  In some ways, it is the easiest to document, quantify, etc., which feeds a tendency to focus on it.  "Well, if I have 8 refereed publications, and my competitors only have 4, they have to admit that I'm better qualified. Right?"

Well, no, they don't.  Nor should they.

First, let me emphasize that I do think that learning to publish is an important part of graduate school.  Eric's testimony that he got no training on how to write a journal article reflects poorly on his graduate department (which, of course, may have been wonderful in other ways). Recently, at the urging of students, Georgetown has implemented a "publishing practicum" - a full course led by a professor with occasional guest visits from other professors - that takes an existing paper, usually one you wrote for a class, and develops it into something submittable to a journal.  Meanwhile the class covers all aspects of the process, as welll as things like conference presentations.  It seems to me that this is a good idea, one that ought to be copied, and that it is a duty of departments to prepare students to publish.

That said, here is something worth keeping in mind: the vast majority of jobs out there, that is the ones that aren't at Harvard, MIT, etc., expect that you will have  a publishing career - usually a necessary condition - but are far more concerned with your ability to be an excellent undergraduate teacher across a wide range of courses.  If you have, in the course of five years in graduate school, published 8 articles on the details of Adam Smith's uptake of Hume, it is going to raise the perfectly reasonable suspicion that you don't know much about anything else.  What a search committee is going to ask, in seeing such a cv, is "but how will she do in our intro ethics course?"  "Can she get engineering majors to take a philosophy minor?"  "Can she teach intro logic?"  "Does this person ever talk about anything I'm remotely interested in?"

Teaching is not the only thing: collegiality and organizational skills matter as well.  If you are entering a department with 3 philosophers - certainly not uncommon - you may have to take on significant administrative work right away.  Is there any evidence that you can do this?  You may have to interact regularly with colleagues in other departments at your small liberal arts school, or meet with parents and charm them.  Do you have work that shows you can be intelligible to those outside philosophy?  Have you been to conferences?  Have you paid attention to the social skills that can often atrophe in grad school?

Of course it is logically possible to be fabulous at everything, but it is unlikely and an obsession with publishing during grad school can and often does get in the way of taking a wide variety of courses, of teaching a wide variety of courses, of broadening one's competence, of attending pedagogy seminars.  Becoming a professional philosopher, to put it as a rather obvious slogan, is more than becoming a publishing philosopher.  For most jobs, publishing is a minority of what you will do.  

So what does that mean, more concretely, concerning balance?  First, it is very good to publish something.  The jump from 0 to 1 is a big one.  When you get something published, at a respectable peer-reviewed journal, you have proven that you know how to do that.  (I utterly disagree with the suggestion of one commenter on Eric's post who passed on the advice that you aim for very top journals.  The low probability of success and the typical long delay time makes this a foolish strategy in my view.  When you are young and unknown, aim for respectable mid-level journals.  But the comment that there are some journals that look bad is correct.)  

Beyond that, the returns diminish quickly in my view.  That's not to say that you shouldn't publish more, but whereas I'd see publishing that first article to be a high priority, all subsequent ones need to be balanced by serious consideration of what else you are skipping to do that.  Opportunities are contextual, but at GU, if I had a senior student who had to choose between devoting this semester to getting a third publication in meta-ethics and decision theory, and sitting in on their first seminar on bioethics - GU has a world-class bioethics program - I would generally recommend the latter.  It broadens teaching competence into an area in very high demand. More jobs will hire you because you are ready to implement a bioethics course, than will hire you because you have 3 rather than 2 meta-ethics publications.  (Of course this is all defeasible.)  

So to summarize: 
Departments owe it to their students to teach them how to publish.

Publishing something is important to your job prospects.

It is not anywhere near the only thing that is important to your job prospects.   And so, the vast majority of students need to attend to all the many things that matter to employers and not, as was implicit in Eric's title, assume that your goal is to be as plausible a candidate to Harvard as you can be. The person who finished 4th at Harvard, and the person who finished 132nd have in common that they don't have a job at Harvard.