Matthew – yes, I guess the under-3000 words for really short and under-4000 for short is a good rule, although under-5000 also isn’t that common and I would settle for that. And in reply to your second question – yes, I have published under-3000′s in Ratio, Utilitas and Philosophy in recent years. I wonder about all these being UK journals. I have published recently in Philosophical Studies an under-5000, so that journal might be short-friendly. I suspect from their site that Ethics might also be (my only paper there was, alas, long). This isn’t very scientific, and reports about other people’s positive and negative experiences with journals would be helpful. In any case, it seems that Thom has bound himself above to accept the dwarfish standard for the Journal of Moral Philosophy :)

Well, at least our situation is far better when compared to the law journals, which are typically student-edited and where surveying the landscape since Adam and Eve seems to be the convention – and one can often find 80 page monsters.

1. Do many people NOT write short papers because they believe that (with the exception of Analysis) the journals insist on longer papers?

2. Is that perception true?

I think that (2) is less true than people might think as one can get short papers published, but nevertheless there is a lot of true in it. As to (1), it’s harder to know, but I suspect that there is some truth to this, but also that there might be other (not philosophically relevant) reasons why so few short ethics papers get written (again, setting aside the medical ethics journals and the like). I think that it would be good for our profession if, in general, we were more aware of this issue. It would be good if people who think that they might like to write short papers would do so, take a risk, and thereby put pressure on journals to accept them. And people who never thought about writing a short paper, might want to think whether there are good reasons (apart from getting published) for this. Finally, I think that it would be good if journals signalled that they were ready to consider short papers (and those that are not, think how philosophicallly relevant that bias is).

-More papers on paradoxes get published in Analysis than in any other journal, perhaps for fairly obvious reasons (I’d certainly advise people working on moral paradoxes to submit work to Analysis!)

- There are more high-rated Ethics journals than journals that are specifically on other topics in philosophy. The Journal of applied philosophy publishes short pieces, so may be a more obvious place for some of the applied papers to be sent.

You might be right, I have no real way of telling. I think that Analysis has something like a 10% acceptance rate, so (like others) ethicists can expect frequent rejection. I vaguely seem to remember a note in Analysis some years ago asking for papers in moral and political philosophy, because such submissions were under-represented. And Thom’s report about JMF is striking, and lends some empirical proof to what were merely my impressions. For your case to stand you would need to argue further that most of the ethicists being rejected by Analysis then give up on submitting the papers anywhere else (such as to Thom). Again, I cannot rule this out, but it seems likely that there is at least less writing of short papers in ethics than in other areas. Greater awareness of this issue might gradually help change things on both the “seller” and “buyer” sides (perhaps some editors might want to come forward and state that they are happy to receive short papers for consideration, which might help more ethicists to decide to write them).

Thanks. I do believe that size matters (in philosophy), and I try to write short papers when possible. This might just be a personal inclination, but I think that the issue goes beyond inclination or personal taste (perhaps into the territory where, as Bernard Williams would say, style is connected to what one is trying to do). I didn’t want this post to be about moral paradoxes, but the neglect of moral paradoxes of which I’ve written before seems pertinent here: paradoxes are typically both short and fun, and if I am right then some broad inclinations of moral philosophers towards bulk and over-seriousness also help explain the neglect of moral paradoxes. Putting paradoxes aside, the issues of length and fun are of course distinct: we might have had many short and grim ethics papers. But my guess is that things are connected here as well: that the not uncommon feeling among non-moral philosophers, that philosophical seriousness can go together with playfulness (and is even related to the daring of playfulness), is less widely shared by ethicists, and results in an inclination to write both long and “heavy” papers. So this is not only about the length of ethics papers, but about the culture of philosophical ethics.

why is there no reason to think that Analysis discriminates against normative ethics and ethics in general? This is just anecdotal evidence but I have talked to quite a lot of ethicists whose work is being published in other first-rate journals but whose short papers do not get in Analysis even to the hands of referees. I don’t think all of these people are writing worse *short* papers than long ones. So, I actually think there might be some discrimination going on.

Since the Journal of Moral Philosophy first started accepting papers in 2003 and first appeared in 2004, I do not believe I have once received a short, non-reply piece ever. Things seems a genuine indication of the number of words papers in moral and political philosophy find themselves, rather than an aberration….