In comments, David Chalmers generously acknowledged that his famous (co-authored) paper ""The Extended Mind" was rejected by J Phil, Phil Review, and Mind before it was finally accepted by Analysis (three years later)." TEM was published in 1998. So, I decided to compare the editorial performance of the Chalmers top-3 with Analysis between 1995-8 as measured by citation impact fifteen years later. (I used Harzing's Publish and Perish--this includes google.scholar citations, so it captures a lot of citations.)
Mind's top 20 papers garnered 2665 citations. It's five highest cited articles are Chomsky "Language and Nature" (497); Edgington "Conditionals" (467); Oliver "The Metaphysics of Properties" (167); Fricker's critical notice on Coady's book (154); Cappelen/Lepore on "Varieties of Quotation" (136).
The Journal of Philosophy top 20 garnered 3352. (By contrast Ethics got 3133) Its five highest cited articles are Van Gelder on Cognition and Computation (569); an exchange between Habermas (536) and Rawls (402); Davidson on the folly of defining truth (242); Calhoun's "Standing for Something" (150).
The top 20 papers of Analysis garnered 2650 citations.* TEM accounts for 1602 of these. Now one might think this just shows that TEM was a fluke. Yet, the other top four all did very well, too: Saul "Substitution and Simple Sentences" (93); Brown "The Incompatibility of Anti-Individualism and Privileged Access" (85); Prodelli's "I am not here now" (79); Copeland on Turing and Searle (77).
The editor of Analysis at the time, Peter Smith, comes out looking very well. For, it does not take a lot of guts to publish Chomsky, Rawls, Davidson, and Habermas (although it may well have felt like a big thing to publish Habermas in JPhil at the time). In some cases, Analysis was not getting the first right of refusal, and the papers it did publish subsequently received limited 'halo-effects'. (Of course, Analysis was very well respected in the period.) One other thing worth noting is that 20% of the authors in the Analysis top-twenty are female. (I don't think any of the other three journals comes close.) That, too, may be a fluke, but given the citation-bias against women in the H4 it is quite remarkable.
I think there are two morals lurking here: (1) the philosophical elite will sometimes not recognize the significance of outstanding work (okay, I didn't need this data for that); (2) philosophy has a very deep bench--great stuff is being published outside the H4, which reject over 90% (right?) over the papers received. (In other disciplines top journals often have much higher acceptance rates.)
*This may be off a bit (by about twenty five because I had to remove some articles that were mistakenly included in the top 20 by Harzing's software. )
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