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Friday, September 01, 2006
Journal Lore: What Really Happens to Your Submission?
Two years ago the Leiter Report initiated an informal inquiry into the reviewing and publishing practices of philosophy journals. The inquiry was prompted by concern by and for younger scholars, who need to get published quickly in order to have a shot at tenure. We here at The Valve have decided to initiate a parallel discussion for our field, whatever that is—literature, I suppose, and allied disciplines.
But let’s start where Leiter started, with a note from a young Australian philosopher. It has a useful set of questions:
For relatively junior people, the really useful and hard-to-get information is...which journals are well-run. For instance, it’s useful to know things like:
1. Will they get back to you in a timely manner (within 3-4 months)? If not, how long will it take?...
2. Will they answer your emails or just ignore them?
3. Do they give reviews?
4. Will the review process be blind?
5. What’s the quality of the reviewers?
6. Will revise and resubmit policies be arbitrary? (e.g. sending the paper to new reviewers who raise completely different objections)
7. Are you likely to run into arbitrary editorial decisions after the initial reviews?
8. How long will it be before an accepted article appears in print ? (PPR: 3 years)
... In some cases, it seems to be systematic. It’d be useful to know how widespread these problems are at particular journals. Time to review can be a real problem for junior people, and it would be nice to have a more accurate understanding of the risks of delay and other vagaries you’re letting yourself in for with different journals.
While the Leiter Report insisted that all commentators give their names, we at the blog have decided to allow anonymous comments. The floor is open.
Comments
Okay. I’m pretty junior (not done w/ diss., going on market for second time this fall), so my data set is only 1. For Exemplaria. Promised 4 months turnaround, which they kept (submitted 10/31, accepted 2/10). Not a blind review process (they don’t mask names of submitters, and it turned out, I’m sure coincidentally, that I knew the reviewer, who’s definitely a scholar who does good work). No major revisions requested, but I did them, and then some, anyhow. We’ll see how that turns out: I’m sure it’ll be fine. Final question: editor told me it might be 2 years before my article appeared and offered me the chance to withdraw it.
Short answer, useful for medievalists and adventurous early modernists: Exemplaria so far has done everything right.
Though not a medievalist, I know from being a graduate student at Florida that the editors of Exemplaria are highly conscientious and professional.
Final question: editor told me it might be 2 years before my article appeared and offered me the chance to withdraw it.
Just a note on this sort of situation: it has its upside. The article can be listed as forthcoming on the CV, of course, so it serves you now for your job search. Anyone who wants to see it, you can send a copy. PLUS (here’s the upside) - the two year wait extends the shelf life of the article. If you apply for jobs next year you’ll still have fresh looking work on the CV. And if you happen to get a tenure track job, at most places, the score starts at zero - what you did in grad school won’t really count, at least not in the same way, toward tenure as what you actually do at the school. No one, at that point, will know that the article that appeared in 2009 was written in 2005.
See what I mean? Delayed publication’s OK by me.
What sucks, of course, is delayed acceptance.
A cynic might here note the apparent discrepancy between advancing knowledge and careerism inherent in the above.
A cynic might note that, but said cynic would be terribly wrong. I have no control over the publication schedule of the articles that I have accepted. Very few without a job, or with an assistant professorship, are in a position to decline an offer of publication, even a delayed one. The field and timeframe are too tight to be picky. It just happens that the otherwise unfortunate delay in publication helps me get over the looming hurdle of tenure, one day. A beneficial side-effect of an unfortunate situation.
You’re an angry sort of guy, aren’t you, Jonathan? If you were Karl, you’d pull the article on principle? Otherwise, save the snark, kay?
It is without understanding that you so personalize a structural observation. The pressures you describe bear on everyone in the same situation, and there are no martyrs who publish free and die. Given this, how is that we look at the ethos of the arxiv? Potlatch?
I had an article published in Literature / Film Quarterly in 2003 which I had submitted in 1999. In extenuation of the journal I think there was some kind of stuff-up connected to correspondence being sent to me by sea mail, which takes months and months if it arrives at all. Judging from the topics of recent articles they must have quite a fast turnaround. By the time it came out I was well and truly ready to be embarrassed by what I’d written especially as it been put out of date by things published in the interval. That’s the downside to the upside CR mentions (which I agree about, and publishing anything at all in small circulation learned journals is careerist / pragmatic, besides, I don’t really think what advancement of knowledge means in terms of literary studies is self-evident.)
Jonathan,
It’s impolite to make structural observations about conversational partners in this way. Do you do this to your friends? Wife? I hope not.
Laura,
Absolutely true, on all counts. Save that I’m embarrassed by everything that I write as soon as I’ve written it - it doesn’t take a publication lag to bring me down with the cringes.
(Another discussion that one could have, along Laura’s lines, is one about the swirling psychology of revising a dissertation into a book. “Who was the moronic little ass that wrote this??? Me!!!!” meets “Waste not want not! There’s no off-switch on the academic treadmill!")
I mean, yes, it’s pragmatic, but is it only that? Does everyone agree with Fish’s “professional correctness” constellation now? Does a project like the arxiv (and the massive participation in it) require a faith in pyramidical growth? Is a pre-print culture imaginable in the humanities?
Is a pre-print culture imaginable in the humanities?
Forgive me if the following displays some seriously gross ignorance of the nature of the scientific field, but I am guessing that the papers on arxiv are easier to evaluate based on the abstract than papers in the humanities would be. The abstract doesn’t really function as an adequate substitute for the paper itself in our fields… This being so, the demands of an arXiv system would be so enormous - everyone reading everthing that everyone writes on everything - that it’d never get off the ground. And any attempt to tightly restrict / direct reviewing would simply result in a peer-reviewed online database…
I may well be wrong about the nature of science papers. If so, feel free to tell me.
And/or perhaps it is easier to know when you’ve “got something” in the sciences, so it is easier for them to limit their posts, self-edit in a sense. Whereas we never know until it goes, as it were - often have to send it out to see.
I’ve had four articles published in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts over the last few years. The journal is relatively new, but has an international editorial board that is first rate. They offer blind review (for both authors and referees) and quick publication.
My experience there has been very good. Two articles were accepted as submitted. I don’t recall review times, but I’d say between 2 and 4 months. They were published promptly after I returned with minor revisions of my own. Another article was accepted conditionally. The referee report was detailed and useful. I revised accordingly and the article was quickly accepted. A fourth article was refused initially. The objections of both referees, however, were pretty much confined to one part of the article. So I proposed to the editors that I simply eliminate the offending part of the article and tighten up the rest. They accepted my proposal with the provision that the resulting article would be sent back to the referees. Once I submitted my revisions the article was accepted and published.
Finally, I should note that articles in PsyArt tend to be about literature and the psychology tends to be some flavor of psychoanalysis. But articles on music, film, and the visual arts have been published. And the journal is certainly open to the newer psychologies.
I’ve had good experiences with Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Responded to my submissions within four months, great reviewer comments. The TSWL article won’t be coming out right away because of a few special issues they’ve got lined up, but I think this is an anomalie because it’s their “Jubilee” year.
Most journals reject most of what they receive, so I think that if we could have some account of rejection experiences (timeliness, quality of readers’ reports, etc.), that’d be great. Feel free to use a pseudonym.
As for abstracts, the arxiv allows anyone sponsored (though I understand that some string theory critics have alleged blackballing here) to upload papers. The culture is not so much having it appear in the right place as it is getting the ideas noticed, so, in that sense, I imagine abstracts are more important, though I also think you can more reliably prejudge, were you inclined to do so, a paper in the humanities that way.
CR: thanks for the tips. Good lord. I’d never thought of the ‘resetting at zero’ problem. It’s a funny thing to think of my job-hunt as being in a race with the “forthcoming” items on my CV.
Strikes me that the thing to do when your article is delayed for years might be to use its argumentative concerns to direct readings of other texts/practices to ensure that you establish yourself among your colleagues as ‘the guy/gal who does X.’ In other words, network a lot, do a lot of conferences, and find blogs associated with your field and infest their comments fields. That’s what I’ve been doing, anyhow: marking my territory.
Could we save the squabbling for another thread? I’d rather the practical use of this thread, which could be considerable, not be diluted.
For what it’s worth, I’ve sent two articles to American Literature. I never heard back on one, and received obscenely unproductive feedback on the other: not only was it highly idiosyncratic (a response to the reader’s own theoretical inclination, unrepresentative of what’s published in the journal), the reader evidently hadn’t finished reading it (claimed it was “criminal” I didn’t discuss a book I spent a good-sized chunk of the second half of the article discussing).
Moreover, it was completely obvious who the “anonymous” reader was, as he “encouraged” me to read and consider the arguments of three of his articles and his second book. (Not that he was fishing for citations, though. I mean, it wouldn’t be fair to increase his already substantial status in the field by forcing younger scholars to cite his work, now would it?)
What I want to know is: Was my experience typical of AL, or bizarre bad luck?
I don’t know if Anon’s experience of AL is an outlier or not. (I had a piece rejected by them after unsympathetic, but not, I have to admit, unjustified readings.) But my impression, on sheerly anecdotal evidence, is that there’s a non-negligible rate of similar incidents in the whole population of journals of literary scholarship. I’ve heard several of my senior colleagues say that they don’t even bother to try to publish journal articles anymore, unless they’re in some way solicited. The process is so time consuming and, more importantly, unpredictable that it’s easier to just write a book, where the review process is actually more manageable. Needless to say, that’s not the best situation for the academic conversation.
I think there’s possibly a problem for this thread in that it’s trying to get at what are really at least two different things: how efficient and responsible are journals in running their review procedures; and what are the chances of getting a fair, responsive, and valuable set of reviews at all. My personal feeling is that on the latter question, journal publishing in the literary racket is a very mixed bag. In subfields built around long established subjects and authors, that share archives to some degree and have some social norms, I think it probably works well. Otherwise, though, I think there’s a lot of bad scholasticism. Given the enormous diffusion, fragmentation, methodological eclecticism, and hardened opinion in the biz that seems inevitable.
I think it’s an open question whether peer review actually works very well for literary criticism. fwiw, in any case, my most mixed experiences were with ALH--which once sat on an essay of mine for several years, until I realized how dumb it was and withdrew it. Only then did the editor tell me that it had been accepted and was planned for a special issue. The most grueling experience I had was with American Quarterly, where an essay I wrote went through 13 separate readings: editor and assistant editor, two peer reviews, and a nine person editorial board, each member of which added their take. I have to admit that in a lot of ways the piece was much improved by the process. But I wouldn’t go through that again.
I had an essay rejected in a timely manner by Quarterly Journal of Speech. Er, the editor at the time didn’t even send it out to reviewers, but clearly took time to give my article a good read and gave it around 2 single-spaced pages of comments.
I’d like to hear more about Sean’s comment that peer review may not work well for literary criticism. I’ve looked at journal reviewing from several sides in the past few years—_mfs_ sat on one of my pieces for almost a year; I withdrew after a very critical (though not-unjustified) review. A few months later, I was asked to resubmit the piece for a special issue, and the piece was published. They took the next piece I submitted with nary a peep in response. I’m a regular reviewer for _Legacy_ now, and I have mixed feelings about the process. I try to comment on the work to the best of my ability, but once I move past obvious flaws in argument, method, context, etc., sometimes I worry that I’m imposing my own reading of the texts in question. Is it improving the work if I’m simply adding my own spin?
For me, one failing of the review process is that I almost never know what works about something that is accepted. I’m more than happy to revise my work in response to criticism, but it would be nice to know what’s good about my writing as well. It’s sort of like giving an A with a “Bravo!” in the margin, as opposed to a “C” with a page full of comments…
Couple of things worth saying about the arxiv:
1. A pre-print culture predated the arxiv. In effect, the arxiv merely automated existing practice. I was a graduate student in math in the late seventies. It was the common practice then, when one had completed a paper and was about to send it out to a journal, to make a bunch of xerox copies and send them off to everyone working in the same subsubfield. Three motivations:
a. If someone was trying to come up with the same result, alert him/her that he/she had been anticipated, allow him/her to stop wasting time.
b. If someone could use your result, build on it, to come up with something stronger, he/she could do so immediately.
c. (This applied only to non-tenured researchers) It was (still is) the practice to ask “external reviewers” who understand a tenure candidate’s subsubfield to evaluate his/her research. While your department will send them a copy of your tenure case file, it’s better if they already are aware of your research and one way of making sure they are was to send them copies of your papers as you submit them.
The establishment of the arxiv saved everyone xerox costs, envelopes and stamps.
2. No-one (almost no-one) reads the entire arxiv. One reads the papers in one’s own subsubfield, the ones that are directly relevant to one’s own research, the ones that, pre-arxiv, one would have received in xerox form. CR is quite right. You can recognize the papers you need to read, either from the classification or from the abstract.
Neither of these applies to the humanities. There is no existing pre-print culture because these motivations don’t apply. Priority is not an issue between humanities scholars. Nor do they build on one anothers’ work in the same way. The acknowledgements at the beginning of a humanities paper are more statements of affiliation than dependence. Had the author not read them he would have written the paper differently, perhaps, but he would have still written the paper.
Nor are there well defined subsubfields in the humanities. Had there been motivation to send out pre-prints, to whom would they have been sent? Were there an arxiv, which sections would one repeatedly check?
I have had mixed experiences with peer review, but I think my feelings about it are more positive than yours, Sean. I think that submitting only to anthologies can make one lazy and complacent: sometimes one gets too little feedback.
I have had my share of annoying and obtuse readers’ reports, but on balance they have helped me to refine and improve my work. Like you, Sean, I have sometimes gotten contradictory advice from large numbers of reviewers. It feels like being at the bottom of a rugby scrum, but I usually just picked the suggestions that seemed useful and interpreted the others in a vague and liberal manner. It would be nice if reviewers could all be civil and open-minded, but I try to keep in mind that they are performing a necessary and thankless task.
I have also had positive experiences with some multi-field journals, including Raritan and PMLA. Both went to extreme lengths to find appropriate reviewers. The article was about Christopher Marlowe and embodiment, among other things, and I later discovered that PMLA’s outside reviewer in the first round taught Renaissance literature at a medical school. In subsequent rounds I was dealing with the editorial board. They were not specialists in my field, but that made their comments more interesting. And trying to find common ground with people outside my field(s) was probably good for me.
What I resent much more than obtuse reviewers is serious delay. Many of my friends have had journals sit on things for a year and then, in response to a query, turn them down without any report whatsoever. Another practice that I think can be very damaging is switching reviewers after an article is revised and resubmitted. Some of my friends have had articles turned down at the last minute after going through a lengthy process.
In my capacity as an editor at Literature Compass, I have sometimes inflicted delays of my own, and I understand how it can happen: it can be difficult to find reviewers, and reviewers can drag their feet. The best one can do is keep communicating with the author. But some journals just mistrreat junior scholars almost on principle.
Raritan has been my favorite journal over the last twenty years, and although it is committed to the peer review process, its excellence has been in good part due to the decision-making of the editor-in-chief. The same, I believe, is true of the Southwest Review.