A philosopher in Turkey writes:
I am a junior professor teaching at an English language philosophy department in Turkey. There are at present five such departments (Bilkent, Bogazici, METU, Yeditepe and Koc) and a number of American and European trained philosophers at other departments. The number of English language departments looks likely to increase over the next few years. So there is a sizable and growing community of English speaking philosophers working in the country.
The reason I am writing is because here in Turkey the main criterion for promotions and hiring decisions is the number of articles published in journals listed in the ISI Arts and Humanities Citation Index. The distinction between ISI and non-ISI journals is one that is made at the national level by the Turkish Higher Education council. A list of journals included on this index can be found at: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~phil/phil-jrnls.htm. There are a number of good journals that are not included on this index and philosophers working in Turkey have a very strong incentive not to send papers to these journals. And so I often find myself sending articles to journals that are less prestigious and less appropriate for my work merely because they are included on the index while my preferred journal is not.
The reason why a number of good journals are not included in the index is a frequent topic of discussion here. And the guess is that for most philosophers in the English speaking world whether or not a journal is on the ISI citation index is not relevant when it comes to tenure and hiring decisions, combined with the fact that journal editors are already overworked and undervalued and getting a journal on the index quite possibly involves a lot of bureaucratic work. Is this guess accurate?
I have a number of questions for readers of this blog: (a) Are there any other countries where this sharp distinction is made between ISI and non-ISI journals? (b) Are there any departments in the English speaking world where whether or not a journal is on the ISI index is a crucial issue? (I imagine this might be the case in some institutions that focus primarily on the hard sciences) (c) For journal editors (especially those who have had experience with getting their journal onto the ISI index): Is the process of getting your journal listed extremely cumbersome?
Signed comments will be preferred; post ony once and be patient, comments may take awhile to appear.
