Open ads over time

10/25/2021

My colleague Nader Shoaibi suggested that there have been fewer "open" AOS ads than in previous years. Is that right?

First a plea: if you're going to post a job, please use a heading like "epistemology" or "metaphysics" or "ethics" and then go into detail in your ad. The detailed description in the AOS section makes it really hard to look at larger patterns because there's so much cleaning of the data to do. I mean really, University of Leeds, you wanna through this at me: "aos is in principle open, but a background in areas of philosophy related to counterfactual thinking is required." For a postdoc ad?!? If it's open, then it's open. Otherwise, say you're looking for whatever it is you're looking for.

Anywho, here are the numbers on "open" ads compared with a few other hits.

Looks like Nader was right, there are fewer "open" ads than in previous years (with the exception of 2020, of course), though not too far off from 2016. A few quick caveats:

1. This is for July to September for each year. I'll try for an update when October is through.
2. I'm doing this in between grading papers for midterms, so the cleaning of the data was fast. I'm confident in the "open" line, but not the others. Why? Because so many ads have detailed descriptions. I've added the others for fast and semi-reliable comparison.