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I'm still feeling sick, but also anxious, which precludes me from sleeping; so I might as well write this second installment in the academic publishing series. The first is here.
Please note that I am writing about the humanities and social sciences known to me; your corner of academia might well be different.
Today I'm tackling annoying questions 3 and 4:
With short fiction writing, rejection is the norm. You're lucky if your piece is accepted; a personal rejection generates excitement and a fuzzy warm feeling; a rewrite request is a rarity these days. Academic article publishing is different. If you are sending your piece to a peer-reviewed journal that suits it, you are very likely to receive a "Revise and Resubmit." Rejection is possible, and is much more shameful than its fiction counterpart; it literally means you haven't done your job. Perhaps you misrepresented your data or failed to draw some obvious conclusions from it; perhaps you are reinventing the wheel while completely oblivious of the literature on the Wheel; perhaps your argument is too general or self-evident to be of interest to anybody. I am talking about glaring mistakes that are easily recognizable by scholars in your field. The journal editor will send your piece for review to two such scholars, in this case known as the peer reviewers. If your article is ultimately rejected, the wait period will be longer while the peer reviewers gather their nerves to bash you. Very few people like to bash, but eventually they will girdle their loins and do it. Some will bash you gently, some harshly, some while maintaining a cold and detached stance.
Of course there are also instances when you are shooting for a Top Journal in your field that might not be a good fit for your work; in this case you will also get a rejection, but it wouldn't be as bad as the other option. In this case you just send your article to a journal that actually fits your work. A colleague of mine recently went through this. She received a Revise and Resubmit (not a rejection, note) from a big-time journal, decided the suggestions were too much work, and had her work accepted by a smaller topical journal in the field.
In general, you do not want to receive a rejection, especially the one that tells you, "Dude, your argument makes no sense, your data crunching is all wrong, you do not know the literature, GO HOME." There is no such thing as a form rejection.
A rejection from a good fit journal is a Very Bad Thing.
Why is rejection a Very Bad Thing? Academic articles take longer to write than short stories. Much longer. A productive faculty member at my institution produces two a year in addition to an ongoing book project. Everybody knows what you are working on; you present your work at conferences, you might get a grant for it (in my corner of academe this is rare), you explain it for your yearly merit evaluation. You tell your chair what and where you submitted, and when you receive your positive answer again you tell your chair, your colleagues, and put it in your merit evaluation.If you publish you get tenure; if you do not publish.... you can lose your job.
This is why rejection is to be afraid of, especially since it is not the norm. It is easy to see why people who do no publish a lot have a paralyzing fear of the peer reviewers, who are the gate keepers to eventual acceptance, publication and -somewhere on the horizon -tenure
How do you avoid academic rejection? Well, please note that I am junior and not a good model, but anyway this is how my process looks like.
1. Data crunching + idea! this will make an article.
2. Handout for conference presentation, usually accompanied by a draft of talk
3. Zero draft of article based on handout and draft of talk
4. Using zero draft as base, outline First Draft, identify gaps, crunch more data and do more reading.
4. First draft of article. Has significantly more data crunching, significantly more references to literature than 4. It is also structured the way I want the final product to be structured.
5. Send First draft of article to three readers (friends, colleagues, former mentors). This part is crucial. I call it my internal peer review. The readers give suggestions regarding style, structure, subject matter, data crunching, analysis, gaps in literature, appropriateness of my chosen market to the piece.
6. Drafts two, three and four incorporate suggestions by internal peer reviewers. Each draft deals with only one set of comments, starting with the most detailed.
7. Draft five - a general sweep in which I look for final weaknesses, small tweaks, leftover grammar oddities, and formatting quirks.
8. Send Draft five to journal.
To compare, here is what another junior colleague does.
1. Data crunching + idea! This will make an article.
2.Handout for conference presentation. (no draft of talk).
3. Using handout for conference presentation, write draft. (This part is very painful and lasts for a long time.)
4. Format draft according to target journal specifications.
5. Send draft to journal.
S/he does not want to show the drafts to "internal peer reviewers" because s/he is ashamed of the draft and thinks it is crap. S/he hopes the peer reviewers will make the suggestions. But the thing is, you do not want the peer reviewers to see your crappy draft; you want them to see a shiny product that has already been combed for lice by others. Sure, there will be some bad moments.The recent three reviews of my current article (now at Draft 2) included such remarks as "keep working, there's an article here somewhere" and "why are you quoting the very marginal A when you should be quoting B and C?! Why aren't B and C in your bibliography? Besides, quoting literature on this phenomenon is useless anyway. Everybody knows what this means." This is fine. It is fine to upset your internal readers; they will fume and/or chuckle, you will correct your various shortcomings and politely say "thank you." It is not, however, advisable to annoy the real peer reviewers; they do not have a personal relationship with you (the reviews are anonymous anyway), and aren't vested in your success.
i found that sending work out to "academic betas" and listening closely to their comments is what makes a huge difference for me.
And my junior colleague? S/he publishes much less than I do and is much more anxious and fearful about it all. S/he is also fond of saying, "I'm just not a very good scholar." It's not true; her research and ideas are just fine.
*sigh*
And the final installment will tackle "finding the time".
Please note that I am writing about the humanities and social sciences known to me; your corner of academia might well be different.
Today I'm tackling annoying questions 3 and 4:
- I'll just send it to a lesser journal. Famous Journal will not want me. Peer reviewers are brutal there.
- I'll just send it out as a book chapter. Famous Journal? You're kidding? I am afraid of peer review.
With short fiction writing, rejection is the norm. You're lucky if your piece is accepted; a personal rejection generates excitement and a fuzzy warm feeling; a rewrite request is a rarity these days. Academic article publishing is different. If you are sending your piece to a peer-reviewed journal that suits it, you are very likely to receive a "Revise and Resubmit." Rejection is possible, and is much more shameful than its fiction counterpart; it literally means you haven't done your job. Perhaps you misrepresented your data or failed to draw some obvious conclusions from it; perhaps you are reinventing the wheel while completely oblivious of the literature on the Wheel; perhaps your argument is too general or self-evident to be of interest to anybody. I am talking about glaring mistakes that are easily recognizable by scholars in your field. The journal editor will send your piece for review to two such scholars, in this case known as the peer reviewers. If your article is ultimately rejected, the wait period will be longer while the peer reviewers gather their nerves to bash you. Very few people like to bash, but eventually they will girdle their loins and do it. Some will bash you gently, some harshly, some while maintaining a cold and detached stance.
Of course there are also instances when you are shooting for a Top Journal in your field that might not be a good fit for your work; in this case you will also get a rejection, but it wouldn't be as bad as the other option. In this case you just send your article to a journal that actually fits your work. A colleague of mine recently went through this. She received a Revise and Resubmit (not a rejection, note) from a big-time journal, decided the suggestions were too much work, and had her work accepted by a smaller topical journal in the field.
In general, you do not want to receive a rejection, especially the one that tells you, "Dude, your argument makes no sense, your data crunching is all wrong, you do not know the literature, GO HOME." There is no such thing as a form rejection.
A rejection from a good fit journal is a Very Bad Thing.
Why is rejection a Very Bad Thing? Academic articles take longer to write than short stories. Much longer. A productive faculty member at my institution produces two a year in addition to an ongoing book project. Everybody knows what you are working on; you present your work at conferences, you might get a grant for it (in my corner of academe this is rare), you explain it for your yearly merit evaluation. You tell your chair what and where you submitted, and when you receive your positive answer again you tell your chair, your colleagues, and put it in your merit evaluation.If you publish you get tenure; if you do not publish.... you can lose your job.
This is why rejection is to be afraid of, especially since it is not the norm. It is easy to see why people who do no publish a lot have a paralyzing fear of the peer reviewers, who are the gate keepers to eventual acceptance, publication and -somewhere on the horizon -tenure
How do you avoid academic rejection? Well, please note that I am junior and not a good model, but anyway this is how my process looks like.
1. Data crunching + idea! this will make an article.
2. Handout for conference presentation, usually accompanied by a draft of talk
3. Zero draft of article based on handout and draft of talk
4. Using zero draft as base, outline First Draft, identify gaps, crunch more data and do more reading.
4. First draft of article. Has significantly more data crunching, significantly more references to literature than 4. It is also structured the way I want the final product to be structured.
5. Send First draft of article to three readers (friends, colleagues, former mentors). This part is crucial. I call it my internal peer review. The readers give suggestions regarding style, structure, subject matter, data crunching, analysis, gaps in literature, appropriateness of my chosen market to the piece.
6. Drafts two, three and four incorporate suggestions by internal peer reviewers. Each draft deals with only one set of comments, starting with the most detailed.
7. Draft five - a general sweep in which I look for final weaknesses, small tweaks, leftover grammar oddities, and formatting quirks.
8. Send Draft five to journal.
To compare, here is what another junior colleague does.
1. Data crunching + idea! This will make an article.
2.Handout for conference presentation. (no draft of talk).
3. Using handout for conference presentation, write draft. (This part is very painful and lasts for a long time.)
4. Format draft according to target journal specifications.
5. Send draft to journal.
S/he does not want to show the drafts to "internal peer reviewers" because s/he is ashamed of the draft and thinks it is crap. S/he hopes the peer reviewers will make the suggestions. But the thing is, you do not want the peer reviewers to see your crappy draft; you want them to see a shiny product that has already been combed for lice by others. Sure, there will be some bad moments.The recent three reviews of my current article (now at Draft 2) included such remarks as "keep working, there's an article here somewhere" and "why are you quoting the very marginal A when you should be quoting B and C?! Why aren't B and C in your bibliography? Besides, quoting literature on this phenomenon is useless anyway. Everybody knows what this means." This is fine. It is fine to upset your internal readers; they will fume and/or chuckle, you will correct your various shortcomings and politely say "thank you." It is not, however, advisable to annoy the real peer reviewers; they do not have a personal relationship with you (the reviews are anonymous anyway), and aren't vested in your success.
i found that sending work out to "academic betas" and listening closely to their comments is what makes a huge difference for me.
And my junior colleague? S/he publishes much less than I do and is much more anxious and fearful about it all. S/he is also fond of saying, "I'm just not a very good scholar." It's not true; her research and ideas are just fine.
*sigh*
And the final installment will tackle "finding the time".
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From:
Innnnteresting...
Agreed on the matter of amount of pre-work before submission. I haven't discussed this so awfully much with colleagues, but the co-written work I've done has involved much pre-work, and checking by colleagues. I am likewise not eager to irritate without cause the people who keep the gates...
We are probably also much less fraught about these things because most librarians don't work in an up-or-out-so-you-must-publish situation.
For an interesting story of how peer review can go very badly awry (if you are interested), you might take a look at Who Killed Homer? It's a polemical book about the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the study and teaching of Classics. The polemical part of it isn't as interesting to me, not least because I don't find the central arguments that compelling, but the drawn-out horror story of how the authors wanted to publish their piece and how it was (via peer-review) warped into something completely other than what they'd intended.
From:
Re: Innnnteresting...
Your article wasn't rejected though, was it?
As for Who killed Homer - thanks! I haven't read this, although I've witnessed an idiotic bashing where an article was rejected two times from Top Journal just because the data seemed to disprove the Sexy Dominant Theory (this in anthropology). The second time it was rejected despite the peer reviewers' grudging recommendations of acceptance, because the editor deemed it too controversial.