A minimum word count for journal articles is among the dumbest ideas prevalent in academia

And that's a fucking tough field

I don’t know how common they are outside philosophy, but a quick Google search reveals they’re certainly not unknown. In philosophy, they’re rarely explicit, but it’s well understood that journals will tend to reject work under about 4000-5000 words unless it’s a specialist journal focusing on short submissions like Analysis or Ergo. It was considered so notable that Res Philosophica was going to publish one short paper a quarter that the Daily Nous ran an article on it.

Granted, they’re not always firm. I asked an editor of Philosopher’s Imprint whether they’d look at something 3000 words long, and he responded that it would be considered, but almost certainly rejected. [This is not a ‘name and shame.’ Philosopher’s Imprint is a good journal, and the editor is a good philosopher. I give their name though because I think it’s important for academics to be more open about their experiences with journals.] Sometimes they are firm- the Australasian Journal of Philosophy requires a fairly hefty 4500 words.

Individually, the people involved are smart, but collectively this is stupidity. A bunch of smart people are doing dumb things, either because they’ve been swept up in a wrongheaded culture, or because structural incentives constrain them.

The basic case against lower word limits is obvious:

1. Some very important work - in almost every discipline- can be done in a few words. Here’s a classic example.

2. If a short manuscript doesn’t do important work, you can reject it for this reason and not its brevity.

3. While allowing space for style and flair, work should generally be done in the minimum number of words it can be done in. This is especially true now as the time demands on readers have never been greater.

Obviously, if you can do extra work by adding more words, it might be worth doing, but often this is just extraneous. Think about the pleasure you have as a reader when you find a really good article that’s 2500 words. You learn something interesting so quickly and effortlessly it almost feels like cheating. Brevity isn’t just the soul of wit, it’s the heart of courtesy too.

“But there are specialist journals for this sort of thing”. The fact that there are some journals that will enthusiastically publish short work in no sense makes it less foolish when one of the large majority rejects short articles. If 90% of journals required that almost all the articles they published be written in verse, the 10% who accepted prose articles gladly wouldn’t make the 90% less foolish.

“Oh, but it’s nice to have a good, extensive literature review to introduce people to the topic as a whole, and not just the bits they need to understand the article”. Yes, certainly, we used to publish these great specialist articles called “literature reviews” for this purpose, but they seem to have started dying out.

This case I outlined is so obvious, so grounded in principles we teach our undergraduates, that the near-universal rejection of it isn’t just wrongheaded, it’s stupid. I have a theory about why it’s prevalent, particularly in humanities journals- where I think it’s more of a thing than in other disciplines. Humanities people do not want to look like someone with a jolly clever idea. Humanities people want to look like masters of The Literature. Why, I cannot say for sure, but I have a theory- a theory that explains why it’s gotten worse. Have a look at this data collated by Justin Weinberg:

1975: average size of article is 13 pages with 17 references/notes.
1985: 14 pages and 25 notes
1995: 22 pages and 47 notes
2005: 33 pages and 53 notes
2015: 23 pages with 57 references/notes.

[Over citation is another trend I plan to have a go at some time]

Essentially my theory works like this. When academia was not that competitive, people just threw what they took to be clever ideas around. Then as academia became more competitive, people felt the pressure to show they had the goods. Competing to have the cleverest idea is not tangible enough. It takes too many years to sort out who really was brilliant and who was playing Chmess. Mastery of the literature and breadth, as opposed to depth or insightfulness of thought, while not exactly quantifiable is at least closer. It’s a marketplace of the mind producing a horrible externality- bloated, hard to read, and painful to write papers, as articles slowly lose intellectual meaning and become just key performance indicators.

Ya basta! I don’t just want to see more 3000-word articles- I want to see some 300-word articles. Honestly, I think there are a lot of great possible papers in philosophy that could be 200, even 100 words. Although I admit, it would be a specialized one, a very good journal that only accepted tweet-length articles could exist. 1000-word articles that, in no sense are novelty pieces, but do everything a journal article needs to do are wholly possible and needn’t be unusual whatsoever.