Once upon a time, a colleague of mine...
Once upon a time, a colleague of mine and me submitted a paper to a mainstream journal and it was immediately desk-rejected. The paper was critical of standard theory and featured empirical results supporting our stance, but eventually it was quite standard in terms of methods used. So we decided to try it again and submitted to another mainstream journal of a similar standing – again we received a desk-reject. Actually this happened four times in a row – sometimes editors would simply reject the paper, in other cases they featured a one-page review basically stating that our paper can never get published for reasons we could not fully comprehend.
However, we tried again and submitted to a fifth journal, again with a similar standing as a middle-tier mainstream journal. And after a few months something very surprising happened: We received an email with a warm congratulation by the editors as our paper has been sent out to four different reviewers – and all of those reviewers completely agreed with our draft and requested no changes at all. We were told that such an unconditional acceptance occurs only once every few years and only with very exceptional papers.
Now what does this funny story tell us about the academic publishing process?
First, this story tells a lot about the gate-keeping power of editors (see also here): while in the first four cases editors did not really consult much external expertise, the final outcome could well have been coined by a sympathetic editor, who selected reviewers that shared his basic sympathy for our argument. To be clear: I have no evidence at all that this was indeed the case; still I would deem it a credible hypothesis. Second, my hunch is that established research communities and networks matter – maybe we would have had a better chance at the first four journals, if our prior visibility in the respective field had been greater. And indeed, there are some empirical results out there (e.g. here or here) that confirm this simple intuition that proximity to specific networks and institutions indeed matter for publication outcomes. Third, some of the arbitrariness we face in these processes emerge naturally when journal space becomes very scarce: if rejection rates are high, but the average quality of submissions is acceptable it becomes very hard to make ‘objective’ decisions, even if all people involved try hard to do so (we have shown this in an ABM some years ago, see here).
Eventually we can be never be sure, which factors, exactly, prove to be decisive. For instance, although our paper did not disclose our heterodox orientation (which typically has a detrimental impact on your publication prospects in mainstream outlets ;-), our critical empirical stance towards established theoretical pillars might have disqualified our paper for some of the editors as also political orientation does matter for your publication outlook (see here).
Taking all this into account I think it’s core for young researchers to find a good mental framing for surviving the highly competitive publication process. My main suggestion here is to find the right balance: be ambitious about your target journals, but do not let yourself down by some harsh rejection. Take all the reviews you receive very seriously, but do not hesitate to spell out if a review is somehow misguided or unfair. Try to conform to accepted standards where it is useful for your purposes, but do not drown your creativity in conventions. And finally: try to accept the competitive culture in the aggregate (it cannot be changed in the short run), but try to compensate for the hostility implicit in such highly competitive environments by creating cooperative save spaces in your own working environments. Getting this balance right can help your career and, at the same time, safeguard your sanity in an often difficult working environment.
Hope this helps and all the best,
Jakob