I was just having a conversation about tenure – not about my tenure but about the concept – and one of the things that came up is how many people would favour the abolition of tenure if it was an option. There are, it was thought, some benefits to abolishing tenure. It could, if managed right, lead to a higher average quality (or at least of performance) at top departments. And it would have individual benefits. There would be more senior vacancies, leading to higher competition for hiring high quality faculty – well beyond the competition for stars we see now. And this should lead to higher salaries in the long run. Of course the losers out of this are those people who did enough to get tenure then coasted the rest of their career. But no one I know is like that, everyone I know publishes frequently in top journals, or if not they are publishing books with top presses or at least chapters in such books. In any case I thought, it’s not ever so clear that non-publishers should have a decisive role in setting policy.
But it’s harder to publish than one in my position might think, especially if one had a heavy teaching load and/or a family to look after. (Especially hard, I guess, with both. A blogging habit is a much smaller drain on one’s time and energy.) How hard, I was wondering? Let’s run a few numbers to find out.
I was thinking that on average one article per year in a top 25 journal, or its equivalent in publishing in books (either entire books or chapters) in top quality presses was a reasonable standard to keep up. But it turns out it is practically impossible for a significant percentage of the discipline to maintain that standard, or even anything close to it.
It’s hard to estimate how many books come out, but at a guess I’d say at least half of the top quality publishing gets done in journals. (There’ll be a few guesses like this along the way. If any enterprising grad student wants to fill in the numbers with slightly more detailed info, they are most welcome.)
The top 25 journals between them publish, I’d guess, around 600 to 700 articles per year. Allowing for some dual authorship (which is actually pretty rare in philosophy) there are about 800 token names appear on the tables of contents of these top journals per year. If that’s about half the total of philosophical work that’s coming out, then there’s about 1600 ‘chances’ to get one’s name on something per year.
On the other hand, there are as far as I can tell around 8000 members of the American Philosophical Association. (I got this number by some not very scientific sampling from the APA membership database – it could easily be out by 25% or more in either direction.) Now some of those are student members, but a lot of philosophers around the world, especially outside America, are not members of the APA, so 8000 is probably not a bad estimate for the number of college-employed philosophers out there.
This leads to a pretty staggering mismatch – 1600 publication slots, 8000 philosophers. Remember that several of those slots will be filled by one person many times over. I’m tacitly counting books here as being worth about 5 articles – but of course in a given year they’ll be 5 articles by the same person. So in practice I’d be amazed if more than 1000 different people had something equivalent to a top 25 journal article published in a given calendar year.
If anyone really wants to get more specific, the following questions would be interesting to answer:
What percentage of college-employed philosophers had something published in a top 25 journal, or equivalent, in the last year? (My back of envelope calculations above suggest that it’s not much about 12%.)
What percentage of college-employed philosophers had something published in a top 25 journal, or equivalent, in the last 5 years?
If the previous number is below 50%, what if any is the smallest n such that more than 50% of college-employed philosophers had something published in a top 25 journal, or equivalent, in the last n years?
Obviously the numbers here could be radically out, and the conclusions I’ve been hinting at could be flawed in even more ways. It could be that there’s really much more publication done via books than via journals. It could be that I’m way out in the number of philosophers around, or the number of journal articles there are. It could be that there are more than 25 journals that should be counted as top journals, in which case there could be more people putting out top quality work than I’m allowing for. On the last point, here’s my first-pass list at what I’d take the top 25 journals to be, noting this list is heavily biased towards journals that publish philosophy of language papers and journals that publish electronically:
Analysis, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind, Mind and Language, Monist, Nous, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Perspectives, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Studia Logica, Synthese.
History journals, and ethics journals, are rather underrepresented on that list. (In history I think that’s in part because books are much more important than they are elsewhere in philosophy, so there just aren’t that many really important journals. It’s hard to get tenure without a book in history, not so hard outside it. This might mean my guess that half the good work is in journals might be an over-estimate, even though it looks absurdly low to me.) But not all the journals there are exactly blockbusters. So I think we could correct for my biases and come up with a list of 25 such that you would expect good work would appear in them. If not, it might be interesting to answer the above questions with top 25 replaced by top 50.
The upshot of all this is that unless I’ve made several large mistakes in the methodology here, then it’s just impossible to have it be the case that most people maintain what I was thinking was a reasonable average standard. Perhaps my standards are just plain wrong.