In the comments section of our most recent "how can we help you?" post, Amanda writes:
Okay so most of us have experienced nasty reviews and wildly divergent reviews. However, I am dealing with a new low re papers and submission and stuff. I have this paper that plenty of senior people in the field have read and they tell me it's excellent, one of my best papers, etc. I have now submitted it to 6 journals, and not only has it been rejected every time, but rejected with criticisms of the type, "this is a completely hopeless project." I am hesitant to send it out again, because the reviews have been so bad I am worried one of my former reviewers will see it and that could hurt my reputation.
So does anybody have any experience or advice regarding what to do in situations like this? My paper is pretty controversial, so that might have something to do with it. I am fine giving up on a paper, not everything works. But I am just confused with the difference in feedback. And it really makes me wonder about our profession if professionals can't even come to remote agreement regarding whether a paper is half way decent. Of course, my colleagues could be lying to me, but that is a problem in itself. I would think they would just give me polite but critical feedback if they really didn't like it.
As fate would have it, I went through a similar case myself earlier in my career…
Before I had published anything, I tried turning one of the foundational papers from my dissertation into a publishable article. While I had some early success getting it accepted as a symposium paper at the Eastern APA, and got positive comments on it from my advisors and some other senior figures in the field, I had absolutely no luck publishing it for seven years. Although I lost count, to the best of my recollection the piece was rejected by somewhere between 12-14 journals. Sometimes I received positive reviewer comments. However, much of the time they were of the sort Amanda mentions: referees dismissing it as a "hopeless project."
It is hard, of course, to know exactly what to advise Amanda, absent some idea of why the reviewers in question deemed her paper "hopeless." If the referees provided good reasons for thinking it is hopeless, then perhaps it is time to give up. However, if Amanda remains reasonably unconvinced (and one thing she might do here is ask some of the senior people who have read it whether they find the referees' concerns persuasive!), then I would advise not giving up. There were many times I considered giving up on my own paper…and I'm really glad I didn't. I ultimately got it published, and it has also since become my most-cited philosophy paper. Further, despite all of the consternation it caused me, I think the peer-review process–yes, including its many rejections–ultimately made it a much better paper. All's well that ends well, they say.
I think it is also worth reminding oneself, in cases like this, that these kinds of tribulations do not appear to be uncommon. As Jason Stanley shared a while back,
My 2002 paper "Modality and What is Said" was finished in 1996 and rejected from 11 journals…Here is my view about all of this, after 20+ years being in the mix. There is a lot of sociology to peer review. Whether you happen to be working in an area filled with schadenfreude and resentment, or where people are happy and mutually supportive, makes an immense difference. Philosophy is just a very small field and resentment and pettiness are features of some areas, and mutual support features of others, and it's just luck which you end up working in. Fortunately, in the end, in philosophy, whether your papers are accepted to leading peer reviewed journals doesn't much matter, even for tenure, as long as they come out somewhere. In my experience, papers take on a life of their own. Four of my papers that were rejected from multiple top journals subsequently became among the 20 most cited papers in those very journals since 2000…In the end, the best advice I know I got from a brief conversation with Robert Nozick. He told me when he sent a paper out to a journal, he would first prepare a stack of envelopes, addressed to different journals. When the rejections came in, he would simply slip the paper into the next envelope.
While I think it is always a good idea to listen to what referees have to say–and, contra Nozick's advice, improve a paper before sending it out again–Stanley is not the only well-known person I've heard share experiences and advice like this.
Anyway, that’s what I’d suggest with papers like these: stick with it, unless and until you’re convinced—either by reviewers’ arguments or the feedback of others—that the project really is hopeless. For otherwise, you never know: it might be a good paper, but just need some time to work it’s way through the peer-review process!
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