A senior philosopher writes:
Like many other members of the profession, I have recently begun work on the tenure-letters that I’ve promised to finish by the end of the summer. Since the readership of these letters includes deans and others whom I cannot assume are familiar with academic journals in philosophy, I like to say something about the selectivity of venues in which the applicants for tenure have published. One good indicator of a journal’s selectivity is, of course, its acceptance-rate. The trouble is that information about acceptance-rates does not seem to be as easy to come by as we might like.
A lot of journals publish data about submissions and acceptance-rates annually, but locating the information in back issues can be quite time-consuming, especially when a tenure candidate has published in 8-10 different journals. These data used to be available in the Guide to Publishing Philosophy, but a quick web search suggests that the Guide has not been updated in many years. I wonder if others who write tenure-letters (and, indeed, all of us who have to think about where to send articles we hope to publish) agree that it would be good if there were a site -- perhaps maintained by the APA -- to which journal editors could submit this information each year so that it could be found with a few clicks. Or is there a website that I have overlooked?
