In defense of journal editors who make mistakes

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

All of you reading this will certainly have witnessed the uproar this week in response to a paper published in Synthese which is problematic, to say the least, for a number of different reasons. (It is worth noticing, as has been often noticed, that this paper has been online for 22 months, but presumably having appeared in the latest printed edition of Synthese, those on the Synthese mailing list will have received a notification, and someone actually took the trouble of checking the paper. From there on, it went ‘viral’ through the usual channels – Facebook, blogs etc.) In particular, it contains a passage with clear homophobic and sexist content. [But see UPDATE below.] But this is not the only issue with the paper, which overall seems to be below the level of scholarship that one would expect in a journal like Synthese.

[Full disclosure: I’ve known the author, JYB, for many years, and have attended a number of the events he regularly organizes. He was supportive of my career at its early stages. I know two of the Synthese editors-in-chief quite well, and the third I have close indirect contacts with (he is a regular collaborator of one of my closest colleagues). I have 5 papers published in Synthese, two of which are forthcoming in two different special issues.]

There is no question to me that this paper should not have been published in its current form. JY Béziau has made important contributions to logic earlier in his career, but in recent years his work has not been of the same caliber as his earlier work (this is also the opinion of a number of people I’ve talked to much before this episode). So purely on the basis of the paper’s merits, the decision to publish it in Synthese (whoever made the decision) seems to have been misguided. Adding to that the homophobic and sexist content, then the decision to publish it is not only misguided but also deeply disturbing. But the issue I want to discuss here is: what does this say about the editorial process in Synthese? Does this episode warrant calls for the resignation of the current editors-in-chief?

The first thing to notice is that the publication of articles that later on turn out to be based on subpar scholarship is very common, and affects even the most renowned journals (case in point: the famous article connecting autism with vaccination published in The Lancet, now retracted). In fact, the retraction of scientific articles is a very widespread phenomenon in recent years, and one is left wondering whether there is more bad science and scholarship being published these days, or whether there are more people paying closer attention. In other words, the publication of articles that turn out to be problematic or simply really bad in fancy venues is a more general phenomenon, and to think that Synthese is the only place where this happens (though admittedly two scandals of the sort with just a few years in between is not good…) would be a mistake.

What seems to happen is that Synthese publishes a much larger volume of articles than any other philosophy journal, and so the probability of something bad slipping through quality control is higher than in other venues. In line with what others have said, I too tend to think that they publish way too many special issues, many of which seem of dubious quality (speaking as the author of two papers in two forthcoming special issues!). At the same time, I see Synthese as one of the most interesting journals around in that they publish on a number of different topics, lines of research and methodological approaches. Not an issue of Synthese goes by that does not contain a few articles that spark my interest. (I tend to think that the so-called top 5 journals in philosophy focus rather narrowly on a number of topics and approaches, and are thus somewhat overly conservative in their profiles.)

For the most part, and I’ve heard this from many people who have dealt with the editors-in-chief either as authors or as referees, the EiC are conscientious and diligent: they work very hard on running the journal well. Having just come out of my 3-year term as one of the editors for the Review of Symbolic Logic, I can only say that the experience has completely changed my views on the whole journal publishing business. It is so incredibly hard to do a good job, and when things go well, no one says: well done, editor! (Well, on occasion I’ve had authors thanking me for the swiftness of the process.) When things go bad, however… (For example, as an editor I’ve rejected a paper which then went on to be published elsewhere and win a prestigious prize. My decision was based on careful referee reports, but it still seems to have been some sort of ‘mistake’ on my part.)

None of this is to minimize the disaster it is that this paper has been published, but I just wanted to add some support to the EiC who find themselves in such an ungrateful position. As an editor, you may make a thousand sound editorial decisions, and no one will notice (you are simply doing your job!), despite the extreme difficulty that every editor encounters with finding reliable referees who can produce a report in a timely fashion. One oversight, and the whole world falls apart around you. This being said, my practical advise to the Synthese EiC, if they are interested, is to take more people onboard: their volume of publication is such that it would be a full time job to keep track of everything that is going on among just the three of them. And of course, all three of them already have a full time academic job!

Generally, though, this episode also highlights something I’ve come to conclude some years ago, namely that the importance we give to publications in philosophy, when it comes to hiring and promotion decisions for example, is overblown. The whole (peer-refereeing) system is so fragile, so prone to biases of all kinds, that to take a person’s publication list as the sole metrics of their quality as a scholar is deeply mistaken. It is hard to break away from such an engrained attitude, but my recent practice in e.g. hiring committees has been to try to be less impressed by a few high-caliber publications, and more attentive to the overall qualities of the candidate. It’s up to all of us to stop fetishizing publication record, and if what it takes is to notice that a couple of bad papers get published (and presumably, many more good papers fail to be published), then there is something to learn for all of us from this episode.

UPDATE (26/01/2016): Having thought more about it since I wrote the post, I now think that the famous passage is infelicitous and clumsy rather than outright homophobic and sexist. Be that as it may, the comparisons in question (logical pluralism compared to homosexuality, and the comparison to a young woman losing her youthful beauty), even if made in a lighthearted way, (in my opinion) have no place in an academic article.