Your Paper Got Rejected?! Now What?

[Written with Assoc. Prof. Julien Cayla]

In the previous blog post, we analyzed the issue of paper rejections. We explained that paper rejections can be deeply unsettling, especially for junior academics. With this blog post, we seek to help other researchers deal with rejection.

FROM ANGER TO ACCEPTANCE

The first thing you need to do after you read through your rejection report, is to set it aside for a while. The Spanish say “darle tiempo al tiempo,” which can be translated as giving some time to time. 

Healing the wounds of a rejection takes time. It involves going through several phases, including acknowledging the upsetting and frustrating dimensions of a paper rejection early on. 

A senior academic, with a stellar publication record to his name, reflects on his process of dealing with rejections. 

I go through the different stages of grief. The first thing is anger, I get really angry. I even start throwing things around. Then comes sadness where I go and play the piano where I wallow and kind of try to process. Then I typically put it away and then I ask a friend or a colleague for a chat. So then I have a coffee meeting that gives me an opportunity to share my anger but also look at ways to better understand. At one point I am, like, “I need to nail this,” and get this kind of energy. Then I kind of move out of this sorrow and say, “I sucked at this version so now I need to get to this new version.” At first I am, like, “They refuse to acknowledge the brilliance of our paper here, it’s like, why don’t they get it, what is wrong with them?” And then when time passes, you’re like, “Maybe it wasn’t so great after all,” and after that you want to redeem yourself and that is the tipping point for me. (Editor of a top marketing journal)

Another early career researcher had something similar to share:

We took breaks when we had nasty revisions. It takes time to forgive them, to empathise with them, trying to understand their point of view, focusing on the interesting ideas – we have to walk away and do other things. That’s why it takes so long too.

We note here the fact that there are different phases in dealing with rejection, before ultimately progressing towards  a “tipping point” of growth and progress.

Before reaching that point though, it may be worth acknowledging, early on, the pain of rejection. 

A letter or even a journal to record your emotions about your project is a great idea. Sometimes, the negative emotions about a writing project can end up tainting the initial curiosity and pleasure the project once brought you. Once a paper is rejected not once but twice or three times, it can be difficult to find the emotional energy necessary to go on.

Here David Sternberg’s suggestion to keep a “ventilation file” seems especially useful. After you have given yourself some time to process the rejection, try to write for about 15 minutes about your feelings in your ventilation file. As Joli Jensen (2014) notes, a ventilation file may help you acknowledge your own feelings about the project and help you discuss these feelings with friends and colleagues. The same technique can be applied to your paper rejection, and help you journal your own journey of dealing with this process. 

THE COMFORT OF OTHERS

One of the worst things that academics can do in dealing with a rejection is to keep it to themselves. Staying silent about rejection further perpetuates the culture of silence. Moreover, silence amplifies the social isolation that early career researchers often experience in any case. 

There is much to be gained in sharing your experience of rejection with colleagues. Studies on communities of practice and communities of coping suggest that dealing with failure and rejection can often better be handled in a collective, rather than individually. 

Beyond reaching out to trusted colleagues, you can also create your own coping community from the very beginning. Conferences, doctoral consortia, and PhD courses are great ways to identify people you feel comfortable with, and to create your own community. 

A fantastic example of community building from the ground up is the group of CCT scrutinizers, a group of early career researchers who used their bond to reflect and exchange on the different kinds of academic isolation they experienced.

EXPERIMENTING WITH ALTERNATIVE IDENTITIES

As we saw in the previous post, an academic’s identity is so tied to their publication record, making rejections particularly destabilizing. So how should academics deal with a major identity threat such as rejection?

Research suggests that identity play involving “provisional trials of possible future selves” (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010) can be a fruitful way for professionals to bounce back after hitting rock bottom. 

For academics, this may mean experimenting with different activities. Taking that class you always wanted to take, doing volunteer work, or focusing on the relationships around you may be a healthy way to build other identities, beyond academia.

Identity play should not detract you from doing the hard work of looking at reviewers’ comments and trying to learn from them. But building other areas of interest, focusing on other potential sources of pleasure, may help ease the potency of the identity threat. Nourishing different identities may also help you better weather future rejections. 

PUSHING FOR INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT  

The university environment has an important role to play in breaking the silence surrounding rejection and in managing its negative fallout. (Day 2011)

So far we have emphasized individual journeys to cope with rejection. A problem with these tips, though, is that they tend to further burden individuals with the weight of coping with rejection on their own. 

Academics and administrators must devise better institutional support for failure and rejection. This can happen at the departmental or university level. In Julien’s department, every time someone gets a paper accepted, there is a celebration of this success. Colleagues send celebratory emails. Rejections are never spoken about, though.

Yet we must remember that behind every success lies an array of rejections or failures. And one does wonder if by spending so much time celebrating successes, we don’t further stigmatize failure and rejection. Institutionally, academia is structured to celebrate success, rather than to support and help academics learn from failure. 

At the university level, administrators could organize events where senior academics take the lead in sharing paper rejection stories and discuss what they did to deal with the rejection. Such sharing could make it easier for junior academics to deal with the shame of rejection, and to start seeing rejection as an integral part of one’s career. When Oxford University organized such an event, junior academics felt less isolated. According to the University website, the event “made clear how powerful it can be to acknowledge perceived failures, talk about them, reframe them, and learn from them, rather than bottling them up and pretending they never happened.” The event even led to the production of podcasts and a very useful workbook on how to deal with paper rejections. 

At the field level, we need to create regular panels and sharing sessions for academics to talk about and share their failures. At major conferences, there are often talks from editors about how to get papers published in the best journals. Yet we must also take into account the fact that many of the attendees at these talks will submit their papers and get rejected. We must do more to support these academics through community initiatives. 

IMPROVING YOUR OWN REVIEWING SKILLS

PhD students receive a great deal of training in how to do research and how to publish in top journals. Yet they receive little or no training in how to review the work of others. This lack of training is problematic, especially since there are still reviewers out there who write hostile reviews. Some journals like the Journal of Consumer Research have started reviewer training programs, a step in the right direction. But we must do more to improve reviewing skills. 

What does improving reviewing skills have to do with paper rejection? First, improving reviewing skills can have institutional effects. If academics invested some time to reflect upon their own strengths and weaknesses as reviewers, we would probably avoid hostile reviewing. While senior academics can take hostile reviews in their stride, early career researchers can become discouraged and lose all confidence. 

Second, improving your reviewing skills, for instance by sharing your reviews with colleagues, or by soliciting feedback from reviewers, can also help you better understand the review process, and how to deal with reviews. Because a critical moment in dealing with paper rejections is when you are able to appropriate the rejection, when you start seeing how you can use reviewers’ comments to create better work. 

Here is what one researcher we spoke to said:

It's a matter of forgiving them first. I like to write a letter that I never send. A letter about how unfair I think this is. I write about what they are not valorising and overlooking. I get to understand what my main ideas are that are not being understood. So then I think about how to revise what I see but they can’t see and I want them to see.

In entering into a dialogue with the rejection decision, this researcher is able to move through various emotional stages, from anger to forgiveness to explanation and finally to seeing what the reviewer sees as broken in her manuscript. By engaging in this mental dialogue, she appropriates the rejection, turning it around, not letting it shred her, but building a stronger manuscript using it.

Overall, rejection need not be a lonely, shameful experience if we are able to embrace it. Personal and community-level acknowledgement of our failure need not produce paralyzing fear of being left out. Rather, by investing in other identities and by truly appropriating the rejection, we can see it less as a personal attack and more as an opportunity to rebuild, rethink, and re-energize.

Academic writing is a craft, and a lifelong journey. Dealing with paper rejections is part of that journey, and part of the craft. 

References

Allen, K. A., Donoghue, G. M., Pahlevansharif, S., Jimerson, S. R., & Hattie, J. A. (2020). Addressing Academic Rejection: Recommendations for Reform. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 17(5), 19.

Belkhir, M., Brouard, M., Brunk, K. H., Dalmoro, M., Ferreira, M. C., Figueiredo, B., & Smith, A. N. (2019). Isolation in globalizing academic fields: A collaborative autoethnography of early career researchers. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 18(2), 261-285.

Botshon, L., & Senier, S. (2000). The “How-To” and Its Hazards in a Moment of Institutional Change. Profession, 164-172.

Carson, L., Bartneck, C., & Voges, K. (2013). Over-competitiveness in academia: A literature review. Disruptive Science and Technology, 1(4), 183-190.

Chan, H., Mazzucchelli, T. G., & Rees, C. S. (2021). The battle-hardened academic: An exploration of the resilience of university academics in the face of ongoing criticism and rejection of their research. Higher Education Research & Development, 40(3), 446-460.

Cummings, L. L., & Frost, P. J. (1995). Publishing in the organizational sciences. Sage Publications.

Day, N. E. (2011). The silent majority: Manuscript rejection and its impact on scholars. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(4), 704-718.

Day, N. E., & Porter, T. H. (2018). Lacerations of the soul: Rejection-sensitive business school faculty and perceived publication performance. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 25(1), 101-115.

Horn, S. A. (2016). The social and psychological costs of peer review: Stress and coping with manuscript rejection. Journal of Management Inquiry, 25(1), 11-26.

Ibarra, H. (2004). Working identity: Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. Harvard Business Press.

Ibarra, H., & Petriglieri, J. L. (2010). Identity work and play. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23(1), 10-25.

Kneebone, R. (2020). Expert: Understanding the path to mastery. Penguin UK, 2020.

Neff, K. D., Hsieh, Y. P., & Dejitterat, K. (2005). Self-compassion, achievement goals, and coping with academic failure. Self and Identity, 4(3), 263-287.

Shepherd, D. A., Patzelt, H., & Wolfe, M. (2011). Moving forward from project failure: Negative emotions, affective commitment, and learning from the experience. Academy of Management Journal, 54(6), 1229-1259.

Shepherd, D. A. (2003). Learning from business failure: Propositions of grief recovery for the self-employed. Academy of Management Review, 28(2), 318-328.

Smith, C., & Ulus, E. (2020). Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualise through macro-discourses. Organization, 27(6), 840-857.

Sternberg, D. (2014). How to complete and survive a doctoral dissertation. St. Martin's Griffin.

Other useful resources:

Oxford University’s great series of podcasts about academic failure:

http://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/overcoming-failure/

Oxford University’s workbook on how to deal with a sense of academic failure:

https://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/files/overcoming-sense-academic-failureworkbook-sep-2018pdf

Rowling, J.K. The fringe benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. Speech to Harvard Graduates at Commencement, 5 June 2008. Full text here.