I’ve reached this awkward stage of my publishing career where I find myself building on previously published work without being able to expressly say that I am in an effort to publish in anonymously reviewed venues. As a result, while my article-length arguments make sense if you understand them as developing my whole research corpus, I am encountering a peculiar mid-career difficulty in publishing this ongoing work as single distinct articles without rehashing the previously published work. Of course, I know that one must contextualize the background for an argument and the points of departure, but establishing that one knows and understands the background issues without explicitly saying, “As I argue in x, y, z” in an anonymously reviewed manuscript is difficult. For one, I don’t want to seem to be gratuitously referencing myself. For another, I can’t possibly re-establish all the groundwork I have laid in previous work as I continue. I have one article that has been rejected from a number of places and at each turn the reviewers ask me to consider another—to my mind, not entirely related—point that I have addressed elsewhere. I’m flummoxed. How does one proceed? Do you move toward publishing books or publishing chapters in anthologies? Do you treat yourself as another scholar whose work you are building on in citations? Do you have to just start completely new unrelated projects to escape these problems? We all know stories of people who have been told by reviewers that they really need to read the work of themselves! Is this problem just built into the anonymous review process with no way forward?
You’re not alone! Although anonymous review provides a good way to address bias—one that took decades for marginalized groups of philosophers to achieve–it can cause the very problems you cite. It could even risk causing scholars to distort the ways they develop their work. This consequence would, of course, be a shame. However, journal editors realize that these problems exist, so please don’t think you need to move to totally new topics. Keep developing your current work as long as your interest in it persists. There are many ways to tackle the problem of “identity masking.” The questions you raise show that you understand most of your options already.
Before I run through these options I want to make a few general points. First, many philosophers have had the experience of having a referee suggest that they read their own articles. You might even consider it an honor! Aside from calling the editor’s attention to its occurrence, there’s not much else to do about it.
Second, if you are having difficulty deciding in what way to anonymize your prior work, it is fine to ask the managing editor (or whatever non-anonymous person answers your email messages) for the journal’s preference. It might well depend on how large your subfield is, how well known your prior articles are, and so on. It’s also fine to ask this person other questions–correspondence with authors is part of their role at the journal.
Third, although you won’t actually need this option very often, some journals allow an author to waive double-anonymous review in a narrow range of situations. The referees will know who you are, but they will still be unknown to you. (My second and third comments assume that editors are not jerks, but typical human beings who understand the problems their submitting authors have. I’ve edited only one journal, Hypatia, and maybe we were nicer than many journal editors, but I doubt it.)
Let’s go to the options you raise in your questions.
(1) What style of identity masking should you use? Assuming that your work isn’t so famous as to be instantly recognizable to any referee, you just need to decide what style of anonymity distorts your situation less. As you set up the context and refine the focus of your paper you can either treat your own work in the third person as if you’re just another source to be cited or use “I” but mask your references. In principle, either way works. Use whichever seems less awkward or stilted to you. If you find yourself spinning your wheels with indecision, try writing the relevant paragraphs twice—each time using a different style of anonymizing. You can even mention to the managing editor that you’ve tried it both ways. Try not to overstress about the style because it’s a temporary measure: before it’s published you’ll rewrite the paragraphs with your identity shown in any case.
(2) Should you publish chapters in anthologies? Yes, but not at the expense of journal articles. Your own colleagues’ expectations of you will influence the proportion of each type here, but there are advantages to writing for different kinds of audiences—especially if your work is likely to be widely used for courses and seminars. You’re well aware of the advantages of journal articles–they are more easily searchable and anonymous peer review is standard. Chapters in books can be anonymously peer reviewed, but are more often reviewed and edited by the anthology editors themselves. Of course, the anthology editors might have extremely high standards and make superb comments, and the anthology might be more widely read than a typical journal article. Nevertheless, book chapters are often given less value by department and university personnel committees. This presents a special problem for those whose topics are very new or too controversial for most philosophy journals, but very appealing to editors of anthologies hoping for a wide audience of students.
If you find that you can be more “yourself” when you don’t have to mask your identity on previous work (and you very well might), you could communicate this fact to your personnel committees as a reason you’ve pursued writing chapters in anthologies. Assuming, again, that people are not jerks, they shouldn’t have trouble understanding your preference.
Keep in mind, too, that you don’t always have to make a choice between a journal and an anthology: if the timing works so that the journal article comes out before the book chapter, you can sometimes use one article or two very similar articles for both. (Lest this sound unrealistic, I’ve made it work a couple of times. Once was long ago as an assistant professor, and then more recently for a special issue of a journal with a definite publication date and an anthology with a more generous word limit whose editors would accept the longer version’s not-wholly-original status.)
(3) Should you write a book? When you’ve built up enough material to make a plausible proposal to publishers, sure. It sounds as if you’re well on your way to a book, but you still might want to publish separate papers of remaining chapters and will continue to need to mask your identity a little longer. In addition, publishers differ about whether book manuscripts need to be anonymized for review. In my experience as a book referee they are more often not anonymous. But even if you do need to mask your identity once again, at least you will be able to make your entire argument in one place.
(4) There are related questions you didn’t ask, but might be lurking in the minds of others.
What do you do if your field or particular topic is so small or so new that plausible referees will clearly know who you are? Then the problem isn’t yours, but the journal editors’. If all of their first-choice referees know who you are and decline to referee the paper, the editors need to patch together other referees who perhaps can complement each other’s partial knowledge. For example, I recently was asked to review a long abstract on intersectionality and AI. I wrote back that I don’t know the AI literature very well. The person with whom I was corresponding responded that the other referee didn’t know much about intersectionality, so it should work.
Continuing in the context of the small or new field, what if you submit a paper that you know will be opposed by one of the most likely referees? Maybe you’ve been at small conferences together and tangled, or perhaps the person left your dissertation committee because of disagreements, or . . . . Journal editors know that these kinds of things happen. If there’s no place in the journal’s online questionnaire that accompanies submission to make a request to avoid asking Professor A to referee, email the managing editor to ask about requesting it. I have several friends who have done this who have been pleased with managing editors’ responses.
Good luck with your continuing work! Keep in mind that editors and referees alike recognize that it’s difficult to develop a sustained argument through successive journal articles without referencing yourself. And please remember that although the problem of masking your identity is annoying, you’re in good company and fortunate to have so many ideas for developing your work.
The Women in Philosophy series is running a mini-series called “Ask a Senior Woman Philosopher.” The first installment was posted in August 2018, the second in December 2018, the third in January 2019 and the fourth in July 2019, and the fifth in January 2020. If you have a question for which you would like advice from a senior woman philosopher but don’t have someone to ask or don’t feel like you can ask the senior women philosophers you know, send your question to the series editors.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.
Ann Garry
Ann Garry is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. Since retiring from full-time teaching she has been Interim Editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophyand edited The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, both with Serene Khader and Alison Stone. She has held visiting appointments, most recently as a Fulbright professor at ELTE in Budapest. She’d like to thank Adriel M. Trott for helpful suggestions.
