I occasionally get asked by graduate students for my opinion on the relative quality of various journals. The context is usually that they are interested in finding out which journals would be good to publish in, especially if they are looking to boost their job market credentials. And sometimes the context is that they just like looking at rankings. As I do, from time to time.

So I was interested in a survey Manuel Vargas was running on the quality of various journals. And I decided, with Manuel’s help, to post a web version of it. There’s a link to the survey below.

bq. “Journals Survey”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm

Obviously this is meant as a bit of fun, not as a serious investigation. And obviously there’s a lot more to choosing which journals to publish in than just the journal quality. (Turnaround time is important, for instance.) But it might be interesting to get a snapshot of what people think.

I’ll post the results, and as much of the raw data as is possible without compromising the confidentiality of survey participants, in a week or so.

UPDATE (11:30): I’ve added a bunch of journals because of suggestions from around the world since the survey was started. If you’re one of the 25 who’ve voted so far, if you go back and just submit votes for the journals that have been added since you voted, it won’t count as a double vote. (I know this is a *very* unscientific practice, but the whole thing was mostly for kicks anyway.)

SECOND UPDATE (10:00am): I’ve added even more journals due to good suggestions coming in. Though from now on I’ll have to be very convinced that there’s good reason to add more, because I better stop spending time on the survey and get back to work. Again, it’s OK to go back and add in evaluations for the journals you answered N/A for the first time, provided you don’t vote for any journal more than once.

There’s been some interesting results so far, but rather than reveal the surprises, I’ll just make a demographic note. The readers of this blog, or at least the survey-taking subset of them, trend strongly young, male and not interested in history of philosophy. TAAR’s marketing department is processing this information as we speak.