Brad DeLong has to this say as advice to a new Ph.D.:
bq. What does one say to a newly-minted Ph.D. in Economics immediately after graduation? One says this:
“Congratulations. You’ve done it. Take a deep breath and be proud of yourself. You’ve not only done it, you’ve landed a tenure-track job. You’ve not only landed a tenure-track job, but the fact that you had more than one offer means that over the next several years you’ll not only be much better paid but you’ll also teach less than you have in the years just past.
“But don’t think your life will be easy. In six years your university will send out for letters, asking outsiders whether you should be given tenure. What the letter-writers will say about you in year six depends on the articles of yours that they have read in year five. Since nobody reads the journals cover to cover anymore, they will read in year five only those articles published in year four that others have told them are worth reading. To get an article published in year four, you must submit the final draft to the journal after year two.
Thus you need, for the next two years, to work harder than you have ever worked in your life: what you produce in the next two years plays an extraordinarily large role in making your long-run academic reputation.”
This sounds pretty much right. Life gets much harder after grad school.
However, in semantics at least, new faculty has somewhat more time to establish themselves, for two reasons I believe: (i) the field is much smaller than economics, so new important work gets recognized throughout the network of researchers much faster, (ii) peer-reviewed journals are important as some sort of validation mechanism, but the actual dissemination of research happens outside journals, at the major conferences, in colloquia, and through online sharing of papers and is thus more time-efficient. I would estimate that work begun in the third and fourth years can still have significant impact on the tenure decision in semantics, and I would guess in other fields of linguistics as well.
Actually, my understanding is that papers can get wide circulation way before publication in Econ as well. The field seems to have a pretty healthy seminar and working paper culture both of which should help on this.
May 20th, 2004, at 10:37 pm #Eszter,
I would like to point ou some positive aspects of the culture of the selection of papers in the field of Logic. A culture that has had a good influence in the field of formal semantics of natural languages.
Firstly, logicians are not very concerned with the length of the papers.
You may write a very short paper, let us say 10 pages, and no Logician will not complain because it is short. Greg Restall recently wrote one 13 pages work that is more interesting than any videogame. But there are long papers too. Glanzberg has written some and they are very good too. So, Logicians do not measure quality for the length of the papers.
Secondly, Logicians do not judge one’s work by the references it quotes. Someone’s work is his work, the bibliography consists of works by others. If you evaluate someone’s work it is the work he wrote that is in question, not the works others had written. Thus, many papers in Logic come with a very short list of references at the end. Sometimes a Logician quotes no more than six authors. Restall in his ‘Not Every Truth Can be Known (at least Not All at Once)’ lists only four works and that is ok. And it is not necessary that all references are famous works with prestige or all new production. One can quote Aristotle’s first writings and it is ok.
Thus, I think the paper selection culture in the field of Logic favours reasoning more than in some fields. In this sense, many national communities of linguists, who are overconecerned with number of pages and with which references are cited, have a lot to learn from logicians.
Semanticists, as I said, are very influenced by logicians and think this influence helps the culture in Semantics too.
May 23rd, 2004, at 7:57 pm #