Dealing With Rejection From Academic Journals

Professor Art Carden talks about handling rejection notices from academic journals and what your next steps should be.

Dr. Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a regular contributor to Forbes.com and Mises.org.

Filmed at the Institute for Humane Studies' HSF-RC weekend seminar on November 5, 2011.

Transcript:

You are going to submit papers to academic journals and at least at first and probably for the bulk of your career a lot of these papers are going to get rejected. The editor of the journal is not going to get on a plane, fly to wherever you are, hand-deliver an acceptance letter and thank you for submitting a paper to his or her journal. Odds are you are going to get a note saying, I have gotten some reports from referees and thank you for submitting the paper, but we decided that it is not publishable in our journal.

There are a couple of ways to react to this. First, don’t take it personally. It is not a reflection on your character as a human being, it is not a reflection even on your quality as a scholar. Rather it just says that this paper needs to be improved in a number of different ways before it can be published. The second thing to do is to see this as an opportunity. An opportunity to improve the paper that you just wrote specifically and to submit it somewhere else, then also it is an opportunity to grow as a scholar and to grow as a writer, because odds are the referees are going to point out some things that you could have done better in the paper and you will know not to make those mistakes in the next paper that you write. So the paper that you finished will get published somewhere, maybe not in its current form, maybe not in the journal that you want to be in. But, someday it will become a contribution to scholarship and that is what the editing and refereeing process is all about.