AsianScientist (July 28, 2017) – Let’s face it—being a researcher means having to deal with rejection. If you’ve ever attempted to submit a completed study to a journal, you probably would have encountered this dreadful email informing you that, “The findings of this manuscript are not novel, and they do not significantly advance the field. We regret to inform you that we are unable to publish your work.”
Cue the surge of anguish and self-accusations of incompetence.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her book entitled On Death and Dying, wrote that everyone experiences grief in five stages. On the death and dying of your manuscript at the ruthless hands of a journal editor, you’ll find yourself navigating through these same five stages. The process goes something like this:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
Your mind becomes clouded by thoughts such as: “This cannot be happening to me! It cannot be that my work is not novel! The editor must have confused my manuscript with someone else’s!” But you read the email once more and your name is spelled correctly in the list of recipients, all of whom you know. There is no mistake. Your breathing gets heavy and your pulse starts to race.
The editors are biased! What is the barometer of novelty? What statistical test was used to measure the significance of ‘advancing the field’? You search Google in a frenzy, looking for published studies that are remotely similar to your own but find none (probably because in your rage, your search terms are full of typos). You convince yourself that the editor is not an expert in your field. I must protest this decision!
Your colleagues restrain you until you finally calm down. You look up the editors’ profiles and realize that they are indeed qualified to judge your work. Hopeful thoughts begin to surface—you think, “Maybe if I write a diplomatic appeal, I can get the editors to reconsider.” Just as you start drafting the appeal email, your supervisor walks in and says you’re better off submitting to a different journal or doing new experiments to shore up the findings.
You feel like there’s nothing you can do to salvage the situation. After countless hours of slogging in the lab, churning out experiment data and compiling them into a beautiful narrative of discovery, your efforts are callously brushed aside by an unfeeling stranger. You just want to be alone, and even cat videos on YouTube don’t cheer you up. The little voice in your head starts to whisper, “Perhaps you’re just not cut out for science.” You almost believe it.
The morning after, you wake up feeling a little less miserable. You look at your reflection in the mirror and tell yourself you’ll rise above this rejection. If one journal won’t publish your manuscript, it’s their loss, not yours. Even Nobel prize-winning works have been rejected before; this might just be another one of those times. The impact factor of that journal wasn’t that high anyway.
