First of all, congratulations on the R&R!

I must admit I’ve never understood why one would put the name of a journal that has not accepted one’s work on one’s CV. I mean, even at R&R stage, let lone initial submission/“under review”—it conveys no information, except perhaps of one’s ambitions and hopes.

I never do it myself, though I see the practice on job candidates’ CVs frquently.

Congrats! I hope the suggestions are doable.

I think the purpose it to convey that the person is actively engaged in research. If I see no apparent activity on an applicants CV, I wonder about their active research agenda. Saying something is under review conveys (1) the direction of your current research and (2) that you HAVE been active. We, the search committee, are supposed to assume rational behavior on behalf of the applicant (an assumption that frequently does not hold); therefore, we assume that s/he wouldn’t send it to a journal TOO far out of the realm of possibility. This is SUPPOED to convey a hint (the weight one wishes to put upon it is, of course, one’s personal decision) about the quality of that research.

For example, I don’t think I’ve ever had the temerity to send something to the APSR (if I did when I was a young grad student and don’t remember, I apologize to the then editors).

What interests me is that this isn’t just a game played by applicants. I see it on the CV of many a Research I, tenure-ensconced faculty member.

What Scott said, although (more directly) I’d say I was aping the practice of mentors and colleagues rather than engaging in a conscious decision to pimp unpublished work.

For what it’s worth, I do have at least one publication that isn’t listed on the CV—it’s in the IEEE Transactions on something or other (Nuclear Physics I think). There might even be others that are pubs or in the pipeline, I haven’t bothered to check; in physics, long lists of co-authors are common. My contributions to that paper were basically at the level of an RA in political science, which might not even merit a footnote in our discipline.

Yes, the different understanding of “co-author” in different disciplines is quite interesting. For a discipline, one of the central ideas of which is coalitions, being reluctant to advertise RAs as co-authors is a rather odd trait of political science.

Even at this stage of my career, I still am not sure where the “line” is between being an RA with above-average contribution (for an RA) to one of my papers and being an actual co-author. When in doubt, I would err on the side of the latter, although it is fair to say that all my grad student co-authors to date have been much more than just above-average RAs. They really have contributed, yet I fear they are unlikely to get the credit they deserve for those contributions in the market.

But I have never listed a paper on my own CV as “under review” and tend to heavily discount it when I see it on an applicant’s CV.

“Under review” carries more weight than a conference presentation for me when I see an applicant’s CV, but (obviously) less than an acceptance. Of course, by my own logic, I am then forced to give even MORE weight to an R&R (even though I know, from personal experience, that one can get an “undoable” R&R).

As far ar RA as co-author….I think there is a different strategic game being played with grad students….(they may be a “competitor” one day, so you are giving them a leg up by handing them a pub….or some such nonsense).

My dept. doesn’t have a grad program, so I think the incentives are different. Many of my colleagues give undergrad RAs co-authorship on conference papers (the general thinking is that this encourages them to want to go on in their studies and gives them a leg up on grad school applications). I even gave an undergrad RA co-authorship on a publication.

Well, I probably should work on the R&R instead of replying to this comment thread, but I will say something left a bit unmentioned in this discussion: institution type matters. The UCSDs of the world aren’t hiring people without multiple publications to their name, and probably not even hiring people who don’t have multiple things out for review (or at the R&R stage) at any given time.

Lower-tier PhD and MA and BA institutions, on the other hand, (a) aren’t necessarily looking to hire people with the best publication records but (b) almost certainly want people with at least some research aspirations; every place I’ve interviewed with says “research is more important here than it used to be,” and even the ones that are lying (or don’t have the institutional resources in place to make research more important, which is as good as lying) know that they need to give it lip service. And, as Scott says, an R&R is an indicator that at least some vaguely publishable research activity is going on.

In any event, the R&R in question is definitely “doable” (probably a couple of hours of textual revisions and a little more data analysis) and more realistically doable from the other R&R from my vita, which I’ll probably never bother revising unless I can find an undergrad who wants to compile 16+ years of data on 100 countries in exchange for coauthorship credit. (It’s probably only a few hours’ work, but a few hours that I won’t spare for a paper that isn’t in my field and will appear in a ninth-tier journal.)