Publications

[AaronM]

I'm applying next year, just trying to gauge how competitive I am in different ways and stuff.

[splitends]

OK, that makes more sense.

Those things will definitely help you. Having experience with original research, and being able to articulate how that connects to your own intellectual biography and trajectory in your statement of purpose, is really key to being a competitive candidate.

One piece of advice based on personal experience: Once you've done the work, try to get as much out of it as you can. For instance, if you already have a presentation ready for ASA, look into other conferences where you can present. Ask your advisor if you can give the presentation at regional conferences (West coast= Pacific Soc Assoc Conference, California Soc Assoc Conference), undergrad research symposiums, etc.

(If you're in the Northern California area, PM me and I have a specific suggestion for you. )

[sleepycat]

Question: What if the article is not in the field? Does it give any points or is it pointless? I am toying with an article now that will go into a communications oriented special issue on digital methods. I do research methods as one of my research areas, so it is beneficial to my research, but I don't know how adcomms in the other social sciences would view it.

[jacib]

I'm currently at a top ten graduate program and of my incoming cohort, I think only 1/8 had a publication. I think they were looking more for what we would do in the future than what we had done already.

As for the rank order of publication on the job market, it really depends on the department. I have a strong impression there is no unitary rank order. My father's a sociologist too and the advice he's given me is that some universities, especially large public ones, really do do article counts. I heard a story about a person who dusted off her masters thesis and got it published in Social Forces. The professor telling me this story had been her thesis adviser and told us "This could have been an ASR article if she had been willing to put 600 more hours of work into it, but she just needed one more article for tenure and wasn't interested in the project anymore." Even qualitative people are apparently expect to produce a number of articles in addition to books at these top top public institutions, but that's apparently less important for qualitative people at some other schools. At my department, most quantitative candidates we've interviewed recently have had an AJS/AJS article (the one I remember who didn't had an article in Science). I think at a different school, a couple of articles in a top subfield journal (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Health and Illness, Demography) or second tier journal (Social Forces, Social Problems) would have looked as good. I haven't seen that "counting" in our department, though I can easily see that being enough for a higher ranked public school with a bigger department. An Annual Review article is basically as good as AJS/ASR but those are invited articles not open to graduate students or even junior faculty (unless you can find an important person to co-author one with). As for books, of course, not all university presses are created equal. Books with Chicago and with Wayne State presses are evaluated naturally differently. But know that each department is looking for something a little different.

And furthermore, the quality of the work does really matter. One of our junior faculty members was hired with zero publications--he gave a really phenomenal job talk on his unique and interesting dissertation. His work was just that good and everyone saw that immediately. This was two years before I got there and people still mentioned specific things from his job talk my first year. (I think had already contracted with a good press, but it took him another two years to get the book out; he also must have had stupendous letters from well-known advisers). Another professor was telling us how he was an outside reviewer on a tenure committee for a promising young ethnographer at a top, top private university. She had only one book (with a good press) and maybe two or three chapters and articles (which for a top department is a little light) and wasn't close to publishing her second project (it's been a few year and it's still not out), but was almost given tenure because it was agreed that her work was just that good. I think at a top top public school she might have been rejected for tenure without as much contention because consistent publication volume matters more, though it probably depends on the specific school too. At a lower ranked school, she'd probably be tenured easily because her work was apparently so well received in the field. We read another ethnographer in the same class who was again denied tenure at another top, top school because she hadn't published enough before her tenure clock ran out (again, one book and a few articles) but was immediately made associate professor at a well-known but not world class flagship public university. It was enough for tenure there.

Do the best work you can do, get published in the best places you can get published, but know what's valued is different at different departments. What I've learned in the past two years is that to get a job at a top department you not only need to have a good thesis project, you probably need to be able to talk about a second project you'll be starting (or have already started). And to get tenure at a really top twenty five research university, you might well have to have something tangible to show for that second project, though again, it depends on the school (at some schools, the administration is notorious for making it hard to keep junior faculty, even if the department likes them).

[Karlito]

Awesome post, thanks Jacib