Yet another interesting piece in the Guardian on academia: Nobel-prize winner (in medicine) Randy Schekman declares he will no longer submit papers to ‘luxury’ journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. His main argument:
These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept. The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called "impact factor" – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking.
It is well known that papers with ‘sexy’ topics tend to get higher impact – numbers of citations – than papers with less sexy topics, largely independently of the quality of the research reported itself. So the claim is that these journals are publishing a lot of bad science simply because they prioritize articles likely to get a lot of citations over solid scientific work.
How does this diagnosis transfer over to philosophy? In philosophy, impact factor is not as important as in other disciplines, but we are just as (or even more) obsessed with ‘brands’ and luxury journals. Another proxy on the basis of which we judge quality is the so-called ‘pedigree’, i.e. the institutions a person has been or is affiliated with. But all these factors are to a great extent heuristics to offload the responsibility of actually reading people’s papers and focusing on the quality of the written work as such.
Of course, the top journals in philosophy (the ‘Healy Four’ in particular) are highly selective, and it is fair to say that in most if not all cases the papers published in them demonstrate very solid scholarship. But as I’ve argued in a different blog post, it is far from obvious that publishing in these top journals is a necessary or even sufficient condition for excellence in philosophy. And yet, as remarked by an anonymous commenter in my previous post (#16), most of us have internalized to such an extent philosophy’s obsession with the ‘brands’ of luxury journals that we can’t help being impressed when looking at a CV with lots of publications (that we haven’t read) in these journals – and less impressed with a CV with publications in, say, the top 20 journals rather than the top 4.
So I submit that Schekman’s diagnosis of ‘brand curating’ applies, mutatis mutandis, to the 'luxury journals' in philosophy. In philosophy, the issue is less the thirst for high citation rates, but rather a tendency to reinforce ‘stardom’ and pedigree, and to exclude different, unusual approaches. Because these journals publish very few articles per year (which they don’t have to, given the current predominance of online publishing), there is a pressure to go with ‘safe bets’. A healthier model, it seems to me, is the one adopted by Synthese, which publishes a lot more papers per year, and a wide range of papers both in terms of topics and in terms of approaches. (There are other problems with Synthese though, including the very high subscription rate.)
Of course, it is easy for someone like Schekman to boycott luxury journals at this stage of his career; he’s made it, he no longer needs the support of luxury brands to establish himself as a researcher. So given the current sociology of the profession, it might be too much of a risk, especially for younger philosophers, to forsake trying to get publications in the Healy Four altogether. All I’m suggesting is that we should bear in mind that a lot of exciting, solid philosophy is being published elsewhere; rather than use the brand as proxy to judge the quality of someone’s work, we should simply just read the papers.
(Full disclosure: I never managed to get anything published in the Healy Four, and the few times I’ve submitted papers to some of them, I’ve had very bad experiences with the refereeing process — with the exception of Nous. But who knows, maybe I'll be luckier next time…)
New APPS 
Leave a comment