NEW Publishing Advice for Graduate Students
Over the years, I have offered what is now an annual 'speech' on publishing advice aimed at graduate students and junior academics. I recorded much of my early talks in a paper, first posted on the Political Studies Association's postgraduate website, and later on the Social Science Research Network expecting little to follow beyond, hopefully, helping a few understand publishing better. The response was extraordinary. The essay fast became the most downloaded document on the PSA postgraduate site and the paper has now been downloaded 2,119 times since December 2005. This original essay ('The Postgraduate's Guide to Getting Published') can be downloaded here.
Since originally posting that paper, I have received much advice since and I have developed my speech far more than before to include book contracts, in addition to articles. At long last, I have written a far more substantial essay 'Publishing Advice for Graduate Students' that is available on SSRN here. The paper's abstract is:
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"Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences."
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I have tried to provide what is---I hope---excellent advice on virtually all areas of publishing: book reviews, replies/discussions/research notes, articles, book chapters, edited books, and monographs. I am constantly updating my publishing advice and I would greatly welcome any feedback readers might have to offer.
Please do feel free to forward the link to this paper--- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1085245 ---far and wide.
11 comments:
Some great advice, which I'm still going through (and may have more to say about)
Re: Footnote 28 (Vanity Presses) though, when I went to a talk on getting published at the PSA conference we were told not to expect royalties if publishing a PhD thesis as a monograph.
And when you come to monographs, I was under the impression that while the re-worked thesis may be expanded in the sense of covering more ground, it would normally be slimmed down in terms of words, literature review, etc.
Great!!!
Great Thom!!!
I'll send you my comments ASAP.
:D
N
I'll send you my comments ASAP.
:D
N
Hello Dr. Brooks,
I just wanted to publicly thank you for the wonderful and quite informative essay on publishing. I keep it next to my work station. I written and published several book reviews in top journals and large circulation philosophy magazines. I'm currently preparing articles with the intention of publishing those as well. I have two questions: (1) Have you read or seen Watson's Writing Philosophy? It's good but outdated. (2) Also, off topic, would happen to know of any books by philosophers about why voting matters or evidence and rational justification for voting? I suppose I'm trying to find books by philosophers that argue about the importance of voting and provide evidence why we should vote. Thanks.
My thanks to everyone for their comments, both posted here and for emails sent to me. The primary reason I set about putting together this essay was only to fill a gap in the knowledge of too many graduate students (and even young academics new in post) on publishing. It means a lot to me to learn that my advice has been so helpful to so many. Again, my thanks for these well wishes.
On 'dissertator', my replies are (1) no and (2) speak with someone who works on elections. (I haven't done any work on voting and the vast literature on the subject since grad school.)
My sincere thanks to Ben for his terrific comments. Let me know be more clear about so-called "vanity presses" (although I will not announce who they are in my view, although some probing by readers may reveal them easily enough).
I can answer the first part of your query, Ben, quite easily: whoever told you this was wrong! Publishers do not discriminate (as such) between (a) "PhD theses" that earn no royalties and (b) "everything else" that does earn royalties. Vanity presses will often offer to publish theses (paying no royalties) and this is too often where theses end up, so I can see how this picture has evovlved. However, let me give you a concrete example. My own Ph.D. thesis was on Hegel. I approached Edinburgh UP with a proposal to produce "a substantially revised and expanded version" of my thesis (following the exact language I recommend to readers). This proposal was accepted and I earn royalties, as would all other EUP authors. Plus, the book is distributed by Columbia UP in the US. I take my own experience here as a refutation of what you've been told. I know this is true of a great many others, esp those publishing with university presses or leading academic publishers.
Now to your other part. Hmmm. Yes, it is often true that acceptable re-worked theses may be slimmed down a bit, esp in terms of the literature review (or for theses in Politics, the methodology section often inserted up front). I didn't want to specifically recommend these as:
(a) My proposal was actually to expand by quite a bit my relatively short (54,000 word) thesis into a longer book (about 85,000 words or so).
(b) I think you make the proposal, send your chapters, and see what is advised. Sometimes the lit review is well done and helps inform the story. See what the manuscript referees recommend. They could say yes and could say no: it will be a case by case decision.
For these reasons, book advice is more tricky --and less uniform-- than article advice, with far more exceptions than with the latter. Or so I think...
Well, I have only one thing to say: "I don't mind that you think slowly, but I do mind that you publish faster than you think." -Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist, Nobel Laureate
...and an excellent point, Mikhail. All the more reason why my advice is not to publish before you are ready, but when you are ready I have advice on how to improve your chances of success.
BTW: Had you seen this quote in the recent issue of Times Higher Education...?
I have recently had a query about one part of my advice. In my essay, I offer the following advice: avoid submitting more than one paper to the same journal in any one year.
The reason for this is fairly straightforward. Some articles are rejected upon arrival as unsuitable for publication without going to referees. Simply submitting work to virtually any journal in the field does not guarantee that it will then be sent on to anonymous referees for review. The goal of all authors is to make sure their paper passes this first hurdle and sent to review.
The advice I've given aims to help you publish your work. However, my advice is not to send every essay you have all at once to your favourite journal in the hope that at least one will make it in. Instead, my advice is to take suitable care with a piece you believe stands the best chance. See what happens. If it is accepted, then great! If the paper is rejected, then perhaps your time should be spent primarily sorting out any defects with your now rejected paper with the aim of resubmitting to a second journal before throwing another essay at the first journal. Submission vetting takes time and about everyone involved does this voluntarily: do take this good will seriously. For me, this offers reason to avoid submitting more than one ---and certainly not more than two--- submissions to the same journal each year. A journal may appreciate your interest in appearing within its pages, but you don't want to be seen as the person who constantly submits poor work either.
There is a further issue about publishing too much in the same journal. I think it is always good to try to publish in different venues. Part of the reason is that different journals have different vetting procedures (even different standards): publishing in more than one decent or better journal speaks far better of your efforts than publishing in the same journal again and again (save with the very top journals: publishing regularly in Ethics is perhaps the best thing you can do). A second reason is that different journals are subscribed by different libraries: the more journals you publish in, then the greater the chances your work will reach a wider audience.
A final reason is --in extreme cases-- a journal may even ask you not to submit work for at least a couple years if they feel they are becoming 'the journal of Professor Smith's latest work' if you publish too often in their pages. This is very rare...and a nice problem to have, I suppose!
A few questions:
1. I have seen the journal quality rankings at:
http://www.esf.org/fileadmin/be_user/research_areas/HUM/Documents/ERIH/NEW_ERIH_Philosophy_Initial_List__2007_01.pdf
How reliable do people think these are? Are there any other journal quality rankings available?
2. If one does not have an institutional affiliation, what are one's chances of publishing or even getting papers reviewed? I have taken 2 years off to work for AmeriCorps, but I have also kept doing research in philosophy (including auditing graduate seminars at a top 10 gourmet-ranked school). Do you think I at least have a shot at publishing a book review or 2, if not one of my articles?
3. How do people see publishing in more public oriented philosophy magazines (such as Philosophy Now, Think, or The Philosopher's Magazine)? Good for a graduate application cv maybe?
Thanks! I really appreciate your article Dr. Brooks!
Kyle:
Many thanks for these. I'll answer in order:
(a) Somewhat reliable. No one doubts that much of what counts as "A" is "A" but people dispute much of the rest. Plus, as I've noted in other posts, the lists make the mistake of excluding *a lot* of relevant journals.
(b) Affiliation doesn't matter.
(c) I'd say publishing in magazines will be seen as minor. I know of no one who won a job for publishing in this outlet only. The prize are the top journals.
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