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there are similar questions on how to list on CV publications that have not passed the accepted or in press stage when applying to junior research positions ( PhD/postdoc).

I am not clear if such publications should include the journal name or not, and what would be the reason for either choice.

3 Answers 3

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Everyone I know feels that "accepted / in press" is just as good as appeared: the delay between acceptance and publication has nothing (or anyway, too little) to do with you. You should certainly list them on your CV, no matter who you are. I don't even list these as in a different category as the ones which have already been published: the only difference is that (roughly speaking; electronic publication and DOIs complicates this somewhat) I can't tell you the bibliographic information if it hasn't appeared. I think it is very important not to list a paper as accepted without listing the journal, because therein lies the route to verifiability that your paper has been accepted.

In my opinion, you should list submitted articles on your CV no matter who you are. (I would be interested to hear why @aeismail feels differently about this.) This advice comes from someone who works in a field (mathematics) for which recently submitted articles ought to be freely available: if you want to get credit for having submitted an article, then whoever you are trying to get credit from ought to be able to see the article. Ideally they don't have to ask for it specifically (because maybe they won't), so you should include a weblink to submitted papers on your CV. (This last part is more for people who are in a potential-hire situation...which is not restricted to grad students and postdocs. Nowadays, lots of academics are in a potential-hire situation or would like to be.)

In mathematics, each paper takes a long time: the period between when you say "Aha, I can prove the theorem" -- and e.g. start to give talks about it -- and the period which it gets accepted is probably over a year in many cases, and closer to two for serious, important work in many cases. Who is reading this part of your CV and isn't interested in what you've been working hard on for the last year or two?!?

Whether to list the journal submitted to is a well known question mark. I do not put this information on "external" documents -- i.e., the CV and the publication list which are on my professional website. I do usually list it on "internal" documents -- annual reviews, grant applications, job applications (well, it's been a little while). There are a lot of nuances here: one is that it is really hard to know how much credit to give someone for submitting a paper to journal X. After all, anyone can submit a paper to the most prestigious journal in their discipline, and in many cases they will spend a nontrivial amount of time before rejecting you. So you want to be careful about this. Nevertheless, where you submitted a paper is an important piece of information about how you feel about the paper, which is worth including in various cases (e.g. grant applications, where the panel will be suitably skeptical). Another issue is that one commonly submits to more than one journal (not at the same time, but in sequence) so the information about where you submitted a paper is likely go out of date, so is less suitable for a sporadically updated CV and more suitable for a CV guaranteed to be complete up to such-and-such a date.

Note also that in my discipline, many people -- especially young people but not always -- also include papers which are "in preparation" on their CVs. This is, frankly, a little shaky: I have papers on my own CV which have been "in preparation" for getting on a decade. But the above philosophy still applies: if you've been working on something for five years and you're 75% done, then shouldn't you say something about it?

One last piece of advice: it behooves you to make absolutely clear the distinction between all these categories. I get annoyed as a hirer when people use categories that don't fit easily into any of these boxes: e.g. some job candidates list papers as provisionally accepted, conditionally accepted, or accepted pending revision. What a hiring committee litmus test that becomes: their proponents will insist that these be counted as actual publications, their detractors will insist that they don't count as any more than submitted, and people in between will get a headache.

(I don't mean to imply that it's necessarily the candidate's fault. Sometimes the journal tells me that my paper has been provisionally accepted, and when I need to create a CV for a grant application that gives me the very same headache: please give me a paper status that has a clear, unambiguous meaning! They do enjoy their little games, the journals...)

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I would definitely include publication titles for "in press" articles, since they've already been accepted (and you could provide the confirmation email if asked to do so!).

As for "under review" articles, I would only list them in the CV at all:

  • If I were a graduate student or postdoc
  • If I needed to demonstrate that the articles were under review (internal performance reviews, etc.)

In both instances, I would also include the journal name.

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An accepted article is as good as a published article and you should include it in your CV / Resume. As pagination - issues etc are not yet final, including a DOI with the details of the articles is good practice. You should also try to publish pre-print versions of these articles if your publisher allows that to get some further exposure.

In my area (Electrical Engineering), a submitted article does not mean much. It takes almost no effort to prepare a couple of articles and submit them to even the highest ranking journals for review, only to have them rejected a few months later. In many cases, it is seen as an effort to fluff publication records. If the manuscript has been through the first or second stage of reviews and you need to show some more publications (and honestly who doesn't?) then you can include them but the distinction that the paper has been through some stages of review, together with the name of the journal, should be clear.

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  • How soon is a DOI assigned after paper has been accepted? Dec 29, 2014 at 9:23
  • This depends a lot on the publisher. In the outlets where I usually publish, it is assigned almost immediately after the editor has been fully accepted or during the typesetting stage.
    – o4tlulz
    Dec 30, 2014 at 0:32

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