I took a look at Google Analytics and my website traffic is through the roof!  Ok, it is 100-300 visit or so a day.  But that is a lot more than my normal 8 visit a day.

I finally went to Political Science Job Rumors (I refuse to link to this) to see what sort of discussion is going on about my posts on the political science job market (original posts here, here and here). I really hate the rumor mill, but at the same time, this is 20 min of my day.  I’ve also promised myself that I would never post on the rumor mill unless absolutely necessary.  So I will post here and someone will link to the rumor mill.  My hands are clean?

Here is a summary of questions, or rather questions I made up based on these comments and personal emails I received.

Question: You’ve collected job market data and counted publications?  Are these really quality pubs?

I answered this in my 2nd post post above.  My counting of pubs is that most of them are quality and most of the search committees that I heard from said the same.

Question: Why is Jensen counting beans?  What’s the deal with coding “quality pubs”?  Is this a WashU thing?

To be honest, I didn’t completely understand this comment.  But let’s give it a try.

Maybe the question is based on the research at WashU.  We definitely have a quantitative focus with the majority of faculty working with quantitative data.  A few folks focus on theory (normative or formal) but even most of them use quantitative data.  I’m guessing our ratio of people doing quantitative work at WashU is higher than most departments, but I don’t think we’re so far out of the normal.  I think our focus on method and formal theory is more unique.  But I’m not one of them.  I’m one of the lower tech folks in the department.

My post was about counting.  I don’t even add them.  I just count if a student has a pub.  This really doesn’t say much about our department.  The Harris School uses more of a qualitative method of reading abstracts.  I’m pretty sure we would all agree that this doesn’t point to a more qualitative in their research than most other programs.

Ok, that read a bit snarky.  But to be clear, I collected this data on my own.

Question: Ok, but why did you count publications and not something else?

1.  If you look at my original post, this was one of the few things on studetn vitas that I could directly observe.  I originally wanted to examine patterns of field work (if most comparativists still do field work) but this wasn’t available on most websites.  But my plan is to continue to do more interviews with search chairs to ask about the role of fieldwork for comparative jobs.  Without running a fake job ad and collecting a bunch of applications across fields, I can’t observe much beyond posted CVs.

By the way, please don’t try to get IRB approval to run a fake job ad.  There are enough jobs out that there disappear due to funding cuts.

2.  I’ve been under the impression that publications are very  important for students on the market.  This again might say more about me than my department.  But I wanted to directly test my own intuition.  I expected to find that a small number of students had pubs, and they tended to get the top jobs.  I was wrong.  There I said it.  I was wrong.  There are way more ABDs with pubs than I expected.

Question: Why do you count quality pubs?

Again, two reasons.

1. I originally counted all publications equally and a few people emailed me asking about the quality of the publications.  Without releasing the data, I had to make some coding decisions.  I didn’t mean to offend anyone with a publication in one of these journals, but I had to draw a line somewhere.
2. Most of the search chairs I talked to used a similar (although informal) system.  One committee member mentioned “top pubs” and said they weren’t referring to “Electoral Studies, etc.”  Another said that there short list included folks with “top publications” and mentioned the list of publications.

My point of this bean counting exercise is more bureaucratic than intellectual.  How do search committees think about publications?  Most of the committees I talked do had some sort of heuristic that differentiated pubs.  I think the line I drew in my previous post (International Interactions, PRQ, etc) isn’t far from the heuristic that most schools use.  I’m just a messager.

Question: Why do ABDs in comparative publish more than other fields?

I really don’t know.  This could be an artifact of a single year of data, the role of advisors co-authoring with students, the type of work, etc.

Not a good answer, but an honest one.  I don’t know.  What is perplexing to me is that I never thought of comparative professors publishing at higher rates than other fields.  So why the high productivity ABDs?

My two best conjectures are:

1) There are a lot more cross-national data sets out there and ways to generate your own data from online materials.  Well trained comparativists have a wealth of data and tons of interesting questions they can answer.

2) There is something random about the market this year.

Question: Why the criticism of Nate?  He can take it and loves the publicity.

Hey, that last part wasn’t a question.   It was an answer from the rumor mill.

Can I take it?  I have a job, a very thick skin and I honestly don’t think any of these criticisms (last time I checked) were out of bounds.  Being upset about my choice of what data to collect and how to code it is fair intellectual criticisms.  Maybe I don’t give the rumor mill enough credit.  I expected more height jokes.

Do I love the publicity?  Yes and no.  I originally started this blog because WashU started a new website system and I had the option of adding a blog.  I was on parental leave and with my son and posted some research posts while he napped.  In my sleep deprived state that was about all I was good for.  It was actually the perfect little bit of (mostly one-way) intellectual exchange while enjoying fatherhood.

My idea was to present bits of my research and see if it drew any attention from non-academic types.  The Monkey Cage picked up one of my stories and I received an email or two from some non-academics.  That was the height of my blogging career thus far.

The fact that I am engaging with criticisms on the rumor mill signals that there is some part of me that enjoys the attention, or at least I think the question of the academic job market to be other important and opague.  I’ve also received a bunch of unsolicited emails from search chairs giving me their personal opinion and experiences.

But I honestly don’t want to be known as the guy who collected a bunch of grad data in 2012.  Nothing good comes of being that guy.

Future Follow-up Work and More Preliminary Findings

I’m a short timer as the director of graduate studies (done in Jan), but I hope to do some post-market work.  For those of you who hate the WashU quantitative focus, I think this follow-up will interview search committee members at a range of schools.

But I do have some more preliminary findings from my qualitative interviews.   I began by emailing friends on search committees but I also asked for feedback from a few schools that I talked to about our job market candidates.  For example, a school called me about one of our ABDs and after talking about our candidate I asked about their search.  Then people started email me on their own.  I’ve probably talked to about 30-40 different people about searches, but this sample is by no means random.

A few searches had upwards of 300 files (these are searches that are listed in more than one field).  I know of at least one of these searches where each search committee member looked at every file.  If the committee gave each file 5 minutes (enough to read the CV, cover letter and some letters) it would be 25 hours.  Cut down the list to 10-12 files and start reading the research.  Lots and lots of time.

Most of the search committees stressed the importance of using heuristics to cut down this first wave into a manageable 30 or so files.  To my surprise, not that many departments stress the Ph.D. granting institution as a way to cut down the files.  Your grad program matters, but there are literally 30+ programs that could place students at even the best departments.

The one common heuristic, sorry folks, is having a publication in a good journal.  Other common heuristics included your letter writers, your topic and how it fit with the department.  Fit was something that popped up almost as often as publications.  There was more of divide on teaching.  Most departments liked to see some teaching, but how valuable this was varied quite a bit.

There are no hard and fast rules on how to get an interview.  But I think the key lesson here (outside of my narrow focus on publications) is how important heuristics are in getting your file looked at.

I think this starts with picking a dissertaiton topic that is interesting and really engaged a major literature in political science.  I think one common problem in graduate school is to see an event in the world and want to write about it.  I think this is a fantastic strategy if you do it in a way that isn’t fleeting.  You need to talk about the event in a way to engage a much larger literature.  That is just my take, not something that came from the interviews.

This also means having a clear abstract that your pitches what is important and interesting about your work, a CV that signals your abilty to teach and do research, or anything else that has your file jump out from a pile of 100-300.

Not the most concrete of advice, but this is all I got thus far.

UPDATE

I didn’t realize that Tom Pepinsky had another blog post on job market advice.

Chris Blattman notes that the econ market is very different.  Candidates are penalized for 2nd and 3rd tier publications.