In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:
I'm relatively new to peer-reviewed publishing. I recently received a desk rejection from Journal X. They said that my scholarship did not meet their scholarly standards because I did not cite people of color who work on my paper topic Y. They then proceeded to list a number of very famous authors that I could/should have cited. (The email did not suggest that I should have cited *all* of these authors, nor did it suggest what number of authors would have met their standards.)
I'm not sure how to take this desk rejection because my paper did cite people of color. My paper even cited people of color on their list of people I should cite (I also cited poc not on their list). Additionally, not all the people on their list wrote specifically on my paper topic Y (but do work in the subfield more broadly).
I know that editors are overburdened in many cases, so I cannot tell if this is just an oversight. (Although I should add that one of their listed authors was the very first bibliographic entry in my paper, so I can't even explain it away as a brief skim where authors of color were buried in a very long bibliography.)
I'm curious to hear how others with more experience might explain this rejection, because as it stands it strikes me as somewhat sloppy decision-making, and it makes me want to send my work elsewhere in the future.
Amanda then followed up:
If I were you, I'd write back in a very friendly and polite way, and tell them what you told us. If they rejected you for not citing people you cited, then clearly it is a mistake on their part. I am not one to usually recommend challenging editors, but I think when editors made a factual mistake and when the fact that they did so can be easily demonstrated, then this is a rare case that justifies contending the decision.
I've heard that in rare cases, it can make sense to write to editors in the way Amanda suggests. Indeed, I've heard that it sometimes works, getting the editors to reconsider their verdict. At the same time, I've also heard anecdotally that editors receive these kinds of emails constantly, often from people who simply disagree with reviewer reports. Given how inconsistent the peer review process generally is (I am always reminded of just how many influential papers are rejected), my own attitude toward these cases as an author is that it's simply not worth my time to worry about it. I'll just suck it up and send the paper to a new journal. There are also some journals that I now simply avoid due to cases like this: journals that take forever to render a verdict where there appear to be no expectations for halfway professional reports from referees, and where editors simply defer to blatantly unprofessional and/or incompetent reports (I am no longer to wait 8 months for a two-sentence referee report that gives no reasoned justification for its recommendation – sorry!).
In short, while it may make sense to write to the editors on this occasion, my general recommendation to this reader (since they are new to the publishing game) is much more cynical: by and large, you'll just have to get used to sloppy referee reports. None of this is to deny that there are good referees out there (I've had my fair share) or good editors who ignore unprofessional reports (which I also have some positive experience with). It is simply to say that the peer-review process can be wildly inconsistent and, at least in my experience, this is generally something one just has to put up with as an author. But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?
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