On rejections for journal submissions

This is a guest post by Jon Robson, University of Nottingham for our series How to Write Philosophy.

Rejection is a big part of academic life. By far the most likely response to any job application, funding bid or journal submission is rejection. Here, I offer some thoughts on a very narrow aspect of this phenomenon: journal rejections (a very common phenomenon given that many of the most prestigious philosophy journals have an acceptance rate that’s well below 10%). Specifically, I will focus on the broadly professional aspects of responding to such rejections. Rejections from journals – especially those accompanied by ‘uncharitable’ comments – can also have negative effects on, for example, your psychological wellbeing. Advice for how best to deal with this is far beyond my limited area of competence. What I am competent (or at least experienced) in is thinking about the future of a recently rejected paper.

First, it’s important to remind yourself that a rejection merely represents the view of an exceptionally small number of your colleagues (often only a single colleague). To run the risk of comical understatement, philosophers don’t always agree. That one editor or a few referees judge your paper to be unworthy of publication is very poor evidence that this view will be the consensus amongst scholars in your area (indeed, I’d very be surprised if we could identify a single paper which every philosopher thinks ought to have been published). Yet, it’s similarly important to remember that the referee is a professional colleague and – at least when things go well – one with a reasonable level of relevant expertise. Often, they will have put a lot of work into their comments, ensuring that – again, all being well – the rejection is accompanied by useful feedback. It’s easy to be critical of referees (fun too), but many of them do an awful lot of diligent work for no real recognition.

So, what’s the best way to respond to rejections? Let’s deal with the easy cases first.

 

Some rejections come with no comments of any kind (or with a few perfunctory comments which give no real sense of what the referee took to be wrong with the paper). In this case, resubmit your paper to another venue as quickly as possible. If you thought the paper was ready for submission before then a single desk reject (or even two or three) shouldn’t make a difference. Of course, if the desk rejects are mounting up, then it’s worth checking whether the paper is really ready for submission with a supportive, experienced colleague (but not too supportive, you want someone who’s willing to frankly criticise your work when required). Hopefully, though, you’ll get some thought-through, constructive feedback with your rejection. Again, such cases are relatively easy. If the referee highlights some genuine concerns, ask yourself whether you can address them or explain why they don’t need to be addressed. If so, then do this. If not, then ask yourself whether these concerns are significant enough to undermine the paper as a whole (this has certainly happened to me more than once).

The real question, though, is what to do with the comments that you judge to be unkind, unhelpful or both. Of course, it’s worth reminding yourself that you’re likely to be somewhat biased in judging this. There’s no nice way for someone to tell you that they don’t think your paper is acceptable for publication (well, I haven’t found one anyway) and it’s easy to merely take offence at this judgement itself irrespective of what reasons are given. Let’s assume, though, that we have a set of comments which, even with the proviso in place, strike you as unduly negative. They might claim that your paper ‘demonstrates poor writing and deficiencies in understanding’ that it shows a ‘lack of clarity and poor judgment in writing’ or that it ‘rambles on, does not get to any profound point, and involves really no clear inferences of any sort’ (these may/may not have been cut and pasted from a single review I received as a graduate student). What should you do with these unduly negative comments? Unfortunately, there isn’t a single right way to respond.

One commonly advised option is to immediately submit your unchanged paper elsewhere. When considering this and the other options, it’s worth asking yourself, ‘how much do I care about making this paper better compared to getting it published?’ And this question certainly isn’t meant to be a rhetorical one. Of course, the two aren’t entirely unrelated. We often say publishing is a ‘lottery’, but that’s not really true: while publishing success involves a lot of luck, it’s not entirely a matter of luck. You can increase your publishing odds in a number of ways, including (but certainly not limited to) making your paper better. Still, incremental increases in the quality of a paper are unlikely to make a significant difference to the likelihood of a future referee accepting your paper, and, given various professional pressures, you might be more concerned with simply having your work published. If so, then this strategy will often be the best option (obviously, still correct any typos, factual mistakes etc. highlighted, since that’s pretty low cost). And I certainly know some very well published philosophers who adopt it.

Let’s assume, though, that you wish, all else being equal, to make your paper better. Even the worst reviews can sometimes help here. Well, not quite the worst. Some reviews are just nasty, they contain no substantial criticisms and clearly have no interest in helping you to improve your paper. The veil of anonymity certainly has its advantages, but it is sometimes taken as an opportunity to give in to our worst instincts. In these cases, the ‘just resubmit’ advice applies. Many other referees do a better job, but still fall far short of being optimal (or even acceptable). For example, a report might include useful comments/criticisms but phrase them in needlessly aggressive or insulting language. It’s important to ask yourself honestly – or as honestly as standard human frailties allow – whether the referee really has highlighted some genuine criticisms (albeit in an unhelpful manner) and, if so, how best to respond to these.

In other cases (many other cases) an author will complain that the referee’s criticisms reflect clear misunderstandings of their paper. When this happens, ask yourself why it is that people are misunderstanding your work. Many referees, and even more future readers, won’t spend hours paying painstaking attention to every detail or footnote in your paper trying to reconstruct some suggestive remarks in the most charitable manner possible. (Though I’ve certainly had some referees who’ve done this. Thanks, whoever you are.) So, it’s important to look over the parts of your argument the referee has misunderstood and to ask yourself whether there is any way in which someone who is reading your paper quickly might have missed or misunderstood some of your key points (hint: there almost always is). If so, then do your best to correct this. As a general heuristic, aim to make it possible for someone who’s merely skim-reading to reconstruct the key points in your argument. Of course, there are some referees who won’t have misunderstood you because you were unclear or because they were inattentive but, rather, because they have made it their business to misunderstand you. Unfortunately, nothing that you do to your paper (short of burning it) will satisfy them.

Another option is to try to appeal the decision. If you think the referee is incompetent or vicious, then why not ask the editor of the journal to reconsider? Use this tactic very sparingly. It’s certainly something that works on occasion but, typically, only when either (i) you can point to some clear factual mistake which the referee based their rejection on or (ii) you’re a ‘big name’ with enough weight to throw around.

A third option is to treat the voice of the referee as the voice of God and make extensive changes in response to every criticism they raise. This response may make a lot of pragmatic sense when responding to an R&R. But when responding to a rejection, it doesn’t even have this benefit. Many of the concerns which a referee, especially a bad referee, raises are likely to be idiosyncratic. Addressing these concerns at length will likely be regarded by future referees as, at best, a waste of time. So, ask yourself whether the concerns a referee raises are ones that will be widely shared. (One of the few advantages of having a paper be rejected multiple times is that it makes it easier to zero in on points of criticism which multiple referees agree on.)

Finally, there is the extreme option of abandoning the paper. It’s tempting just to say something encouraging about persevering here, reminding you of the various hugely influential articles which were repeatedly rejected by journal after journal. There’s certainly something to be said for this. In particular, it’s very easy for someone just starting out to take any rejection as a sign that their papers (and, unfortunately sometimes they themselves) just aren’t good enough. That’s why I was so keen to stress above that a single rejection, unpleasant though it may be, really doesn’t tell you much about the quality of your work. Still, there are some projects which really are dead ends: sometimes arguments just don’t work, views turn out to be untenable, etc. If you think the referee has shown that this applies to your paper – not just after you receive your rejection, but after careful reflection and discussion with colleagues – then it might well be worth abandoning it (of course, pragmatic considerations also come into play here and there is no guarantee that a ‘dead end’ paper won’t end up getting published, referees are as fallible in their acceptances as their rejections). This happens, and a single paper not working out shouldn’t be taken, either by you or by others, as any kind of a reflection on your general academic ability. Serious academic writing involves taking risks, and sometimes risks don’t pay off in a particular case. It is also important to note that a ‘failed’ paper of this kind can still be useful in various ways. Material can be cannibalised for future papers, you can learn important lessons about why certain arguments don’t work, and so on.

In summary, rejection happens and its unpleasant. I’d like to be able to tell you that a single paper being rejected doesn’t matter – and very often that is the case – but sometimes, particularly given the nature of the current job market, it really does. Hopefully the advice above will be helpful to some of those encountering journal rejections for the first time but, unfortunately, this isn’t an area where any easy answers are available.

Comments

[postdoc]

Thanks Helen, this is all good advice.
I think it's also worth distinguishing between different kinds of helpful/good faith referee comments when deciding whether to revise or resubmit to another journal as is. Some referee comments point out small mistakes, avoidable misunderstandings, or minor objections that are easily fixed without compromising the overall structure and flow of the paper. These are of course worth addressing before a new submission. But some referee comments really amount to substantive counter-arguments of the sort that one might expect to encounter in a response to one's published work, or reflect a disagreement on some fundamental point that you must take for granted for the purposes of your argument. Authors should be cautious about revising in light of these kinds of comments, in my view, because they represent a kind of "referee overkill." By this, I mean that the referee has focused on issues that would be more productively engaged with in public debate and in print, rather than the question of whether your paper would make a good contribution to the literature. Revising your paper in light of comments like these is a waste of time, in my opinion, because no paper should have to pre-emptively respond to *all* potential objections and counter-arguments. Trying to do so usually ends up making one's paper worse.
Notably, referee overkill usually starts out pretty well-intentioned - it's hard to come up with good counterarguments unless you really think hard about a paper. But it also effectively deprives the philosophical community of a debate that might have happened out in the open, and thus totally defeats the purpose of peer review.

[Mark van Roojen]

This is all really good advice. That you can learn from even bad referee's reports and figure out how to make a paper better unless they don't say anything much at all is worth knowing, as is knowing that a negative verdict at a journal is not the profession's verdict on your work. Nice job of advising on this!

[Steven French]

Thanks Helen; thats all excellent advice and really helpful. Could I just suggest a practical step: after you've read through the referees' reports, step away! Leave them for a few days, go and do something else ... then go back and read them again. So many times my initial reaction, ranging from a sad shake of the head over how someone could so obviously miss the point to apoplectic rage at the stupidity of their criticisms, has given way on further reflection to something rather more measured and in most cases the comment that triggered my fury has turned out to be on the button, or suggestive or illustrative of my own lack of clarity.

Of course, you might still be enraged on second reading, in which case maybe that particular comment should be ignored!

[Chris]

Thanks, Jon! All good advice!

[Peter Furlong]

Thanks for the post, Jon. I think this is spot on. The only thing I will add is that referee overkill often becomes noticeable to other readers, or so I am tempted to think. Although I have only confirmed a few cases, I often find myself reading an article or book chapter and find a paragraph or two that is either merely tangentially related or brushes away some fairly strange objection and which is abruptly inserted into the flow of the text. This always makes me think that this was done at the behest of a referee. Perhaps such poor integration is the fault of the author, but most of the time I feel as though the topic addressed would have been best left alone in that particular work. Perhaps, though, I am often mistaken about the cause of such passages.

[A Philosopher]

Like Peter, I notice the signs of referee overkill in a lot of papers. I recently read a book which seemed to be filled with it, although perhaps it was simply this author's style to preempt every possible objection. In either case, it, I thought, seriously detracted from the flow of the book. I think this is something to think about as a referee: asking authors to respond to objections that only 20-30% of readers will actually be concerned by is not normally helping them to improve their paper.

[Tom Cochrane]

I think one thing not mentioned yet, but which has become clearer to me over the years (both as author and reviewer) is that if the editors like your paper, they will allow several rounds of revision, even given strong objections. If the editors don't like (or just don't care about) your paper- they will reject for any trivial reason. Editors are the true gatekeepers of our profession and their power is immense.

The upshot is that, as an author, polishing doesn't matter so much. A sympathetic editor will let you do this during revisions anyway. So just make sure the fundamentals are strong and clear.

Meanwhile, your first job as a reviewer is to convince the editor one way or the other. If you like a paper, but you have problems with it, but don't let these bury your support for the paper!