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Dealing with harsh journal rejections?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

How do you deal with very critical rejections at journals, the sort that claims that there is almost nothing good in your paper?

I have submitted a draft to 3 places so far, the first two are top ones, and I got mixed reviews recommending acceptance and rejection (which also contains encouraging comments). Then I submitted to a third one, not so top, as the possibly last try. To my surprise, the two referee reports are very negative and criticize everything I said that they selected as "superficial" "mistaken" "not minimally novel" etc. While I try to take in everything the referees say, it is painful to do that. Do you have such experience and how do you deal with it? Also, do you know why less top journals can give much more harsh reports? That seems counterintuitive. (In the early rejections, even for the negative part the referees only say something like the arguments are not as decisive as the author seem to think, not utterly dismissive.) Thanks a lot.

This is a great query, and I'm very curious to hear from readers. Here are my thoughts and experiences…

First things first: it is entirely normal to receive very critical comments from journals, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the actual quality of your work. I've heard that everyone gets comments like these, including well-accomplished senior academics. To take just one example, my spouse's dissertation supervisor, Paul Spector, is one of the most influential academics in his field (he's been cited nearly 100,000 times and received a lifetime achievement award). Yet, a couple of years ago, he told us that he had recently received a journal rejection that contained something like the classic dismissal, "This paper is nowhere near publishable. It must have been written by an inexperienced undergraduate/graduate student." Naturally, he sent the paper off to an even better journal and it was accepted. My dissertation supervisor at Arizona told me similar stories. He told me that he had one paper rejected at like 9 journals, but then sent it to a top journal and it was accepted straightaway. He also told me, back in the days when you actually had to mail off hard copies of papers to journals, that he would already have additional copies of the paper in an envelope addressed to the next journal he planned to send the paper to, so that when he received absurd reviewer comments, he'd just send the paper off again immediately.

I've had similar experiences myself, and sadly, inflammatory reviewer comments appear to be comparatively common in philosophy. Funnily enough, sometimes I've even received brutal comments paired with uniformly positive comments by another reviewer (e.g. one reviewer saying, "This is worthless" and the other saying more or less, "This must be published!"). Experiences like these suggest what my dissertation supervisor's strategy implies: journal reviews are such a crapshoot that you shouldn't get too hung up on what this or that reviewer says. If the content of a negative review strikes you as justified and useful, then by all means, improve the paper! But, if (as can be the case) a review seems wrong to you or absurdly harsh, try not to get too hung up on it. Just send the paper out again, see what happens, and don't give up until you are convinced the paper is too flawed to publish.

How, then, should deal with very critical rejections? Aside from just sending the paper out again (or revising it if you’re convinced that the reviewer has a point), I'm not sure that I have any particularly good strategy other than trying to cultivate a "thick skin", as it were. Whenever I receive a decision email from a journal, I'm immediately gripped by fear of even opening it. If I receive positive reviews, that's a wonderful surprise. But, if I receive brutal reviews, I'll often just close the email for a day or two and come back to it when my ego has recovered a bit. Then, I'll try to see if the brutal reviewer(s) have a point, and if so, I'll revise the paper. To be fair, sometimes they do have a point, and so, months or years later when I do get the paper accepted, I'll be thankful for the role the comments played in improving the paper. But that doesn't make it any easier to grapple with reviews like this when you get them. Sometimes I wish that journal editors would edit out unnecessarily harsh language or tell reviewers that it's unacceptable to write stuff like that–but, in the meantime, I just try to suck it up, as it were, and forge on.

Anyway, that's all I got. What about you all? How do you deal with harsh journal rejections? Also, do any of you share the OP's experience of lower-ranked journals having meaner reports than higher ranked journals? Any theories as to why that might be?

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16 responses to “Dealing with harsh journal rejections?”

  1. anon

    Sorry to hear about this unnecessarily harsh rejection. For me, the tone of the reports is not a factor in how I respond (and I’ve received harsh reports too).
    The key thing is : have they actually justified what they said, or just asserted that your arguments are mistaken or insufficiently novel? If they did not provide a justification, I would submit the paper elsewhere immediately and without changes. If they did, then I would think about it a bit more first.
    (And I will add that multiple papers of mine that referees told me were hopeless are now in print.)

    Reply
  2. TN

    When I first received them these kind of reviews cut really deeply. Even kinder rejections hurt bad. Over time they cut less and less deeply, to the point where now they only sting a bit. I think you really do just build up tolerance. It is yet another reason to start sending off papers as early as possible as a grad student. The sooner you start getting rejections the sooner you can start growing tough skin, as Marcus says. The people you will be competing against for jobs are sending off papers as early grad students and you should be too.

    Reply
  3. david

    But here’s a question: WHY are reviewers in
    philosophy so abusive when reviewing submitted
    papers? Couldn’t they accomplish the reviewing task
    without the gratuitous harshness? Is it really
    necessary?

    Reply
  4. Eric Wilson

    FWIW, I second Marcus’s remarks about strategy. Furthermore, while it can be useful to develop a thick skin, it’s even more important to be able to discern the difference between criticisms that should be dismissed and those that should be taken to heart and learned from. This requires experience, deep knowledge of your subject, and the ability to regulate one’s emotions. No referee should be an asshole and the absurdly harsh comments often say more about the referee than one’s paper. But tough criticisms can be warranted, and it’s important to learn from them.
    The advice to develop a thick skin has severe limits, especially if you already feel like an outsider in your field (or the whole profession). I wish people in our profession would be less quick to dispense it. Yes, the submission process is a bit of a crap-shoot, and some degree of detachment is essential. But a thick skin can reduce pleasure as much as it reduces pain, and it seems closely connected to cynicism and bitterness. (Might it also make us more likely to inflict the same harsh behavior on others?) Few are immune to the pain of rejection and harsh, esp. humiliating, criticism, and it can be important to acknowledge this openly rather than trying to suppress it. When you submit something you’ve worked on, you make yourself vulnerable. For some, the experience can be crushing. (Again, I assume this is more likely if you’re already feeling like an outsider or imposter.) No surprise that this is when being attacked feels the worst. It’s also important to find a supportive group of fellow academics who can help one celebrate the victories and endure the defeats.

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  5. focus on what’s useful

    This is a strategy I learned after dealing with several rejection, but I think it can be used earlier. Try to separate what is useful from what is not, abstracting away from the harshness. For instance, if the reviewer demolishes a view which you did not defend, work on making your position clearer. But if the reviewer claims not to have understood anything from the paper, or deeming it ‘hard to read’ without significant input, and it is clear that other reviewers can engage with the paper, you can ignore that (this has happened to me).
    Interestingly, this strategy has also helped me handle negative feedback outside of academia too.

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  6. Bill Vanderburgh

    It might be helpful to realize that some harsh referee reports are written by grad students, who are new to the business and may feel like they need to prove themselves by showing what they misperceive to be intellectual dominance. Others are written by more established scholars who have the toxic belief that they are gatekeepers of the profession. From either source, the negativity is unjustified and can be ignored.
    Remembering this may be of limited comfort when you are trying to process an unnecessarily harsh referee repot. If it is truly egregious, let the editor know so they can be sure not to ask that person again. (The editor presumably read the report but may not have registered it in the way you did.)
    I’d love to see editors return reviews to referees for corrections to style and politeness before passing the reviews on to authors!

    Reply
  7. rutabagas

    That’s really hard, and I’m sorry. I don’t have advice for you beyond what others have said, but I do have a thought for referees. For me, it’s helpful to think of myself as having a “criticism budget.” If I’m recommending rejecting the paper, especially if the review is on the negative side, then I’m going over budget if I twist the knife by making critical comments about the writing style or grammar. If I’m recommending acceptance or R&R, I have more room to make organizational comments. Comparing the author to an undergrad or grad student is basically always overspending my budget. I’m sure I’ve written reviews that have made authors unhappy, and I’m also certain I’ve been unfair even though I’ve tried not to be, but I hope this helps keep my reviews from being as mean-spirited as some I’ve gotten.

    Reply
  8. david

    Perhaps this phenomenon could best be described as
    “revenge of the nerds”! The only problem is that
    other nerds (like us) are unfortunately the
    victims!

    Reply
  9. Prof L

    As others have said, this is totally normal and don’t sweat it.
    Since it’s a rejection, it’s optional to take into account the feedback. But there’s always something to be gleaned from a report. If they think it’s not minimally novel, they might be wrong, but at the very least, two people read your paper without understanding what was novel about it. So make the novelty clearer/discuss this more explicitly … Things like that.
    Practical advice: read through the comments, let yourself feel indignant. Then set it aside for a month, don’t even think about it. Then come back to it and summarize the comments on a separate sheet, ignoring any perceived hostility but taking the comments seriously. Work through the set of summarized comments and revise on that basis.

    Reply
  10. Daniel Weltman

    I copy and paste the reviewer comments into a Microsoft Word document. I then delete all the needlessly harsh stuff, all the irrelevant stuff, and all the unhelpful stuff. (Sometimes this means I delete the entire reviewer comment.) I use what is left to revise the paper, if it in fact needs revision. Even some of the worst reviewer comments get much easier to deal with when you’ve deleted the objectionable stuff, and often when you go through this process you end up deleting the entire comment, because the reviewer is not just harsh but ignorant and thus not in a position to provide helpful feedback. (My most recently accepted paper at one point got some very harsh comments that I basically ignored by following this procedure.)

    Reply
  11. UK Postdoc

    Although reviewers are in the first place responsible for the tone and content of their review, I wonder what the role of editors is in this process. Do editors ever ask reviewers to tone down their reviews, or choose not to forward (parts of) a review because of the tone or harsh content of the comments? Should they?
    Perhaps this is a question for another thread, but with some of the more egrarious cases of harsh reviewer ‘feedback’ I am always surprised that editors don’t intervene, and I wonder why that is.

    Reply
  12. Andy

    I have also had OP’s experience of getting mainly positive (but not quite positive enough) verdicts from top 5 journals, only to have my papers absolutely slated by reviewers further down the food chain. If I’m honest my usual reaction is to write off such reviewers as idiots. I’ll usually try to do a bit more idiot-proofing and then send the paper out again.
    This might seem like a bad attitude – presumably, the referees are judged to be experts by journal editors. Presumably, they have PhDs and publications themselves. Surely, they cannot be idiots?
    My response is that many of us become temporary idiots when reviewing papers. Reviewing is unpaid thankless labor carried out usually in a rushed manner by overworked people who really don’t have time to spare. Moreover, the incentive structures in reviewing are totally messed up. There is usually little to be gained from recommending a paper for publication. If you are a junior scholar then there is at least a chance that you will be recommending for publication a paper by a job market competitor, thus giving advantages to others in a market where marginal differences can make all the difference (this has actually happened a few times to me that I am aware of). This creates an incentive to just read papers superficially and quickly find a reason for rejection just to get them off one’s desk. This is especially the case at lower ranked journals where A) the reviewers are likely to be less experienced/earlier in their career, and B) attitudes toward the journal itself are likely to color one’s perception of the sorts of papers they send out for review.

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  13. Assistant Professor

    I appreciate what everyone had said so far – much of which resonates with how I try to think and act in light of uncharitable reviews. One additional questions for folks still reading and responding to this thread:
    What about advice when you receive an excessively harsh review from one reviewer (but praise from the other) and the editors don’t reject but ask you to respond? Sure, you can do what others have already noted and look for the threads of actual substance to the review and just respond to that. But if there is not much substantive to the review then responding sort of feels like just groveling to the editor to side with reviewer 1 rather than reviewer 2 in their determination. What would people recommend on how to handle this when the editor punts this back to the author rather than making a determination when reviewers are split like this?

    Reply
  14. Marcus Arvan

    @Assistant Professor: I actually had a paper like that a few years ago at a good journal. Reviewer 1 (who was clearly an accomplished expert in the paper’s area) was overwhelmingly positive, writing a detailed report that praised the paper but asked for some revisions. Reviewer 2 submitted a harsh, perfunctory, one-paragraph review that dismissed the entire project. The journal editors gave an R&R, I addressed Reviewer 1’s feedback in detail, tried (at least nominally) to address a few of Reviewer 2’s perfunctory concerns, and wrote in my “response to reviewers” that I respectfully disagreed with Reviewer 2’s estimation of the paper, but thanked them for their comments and briefly explained how I (sort of) tried to address their feedback in revisions.
    From what I can tell, the editors appeared to ignore Reviewer 2’s report altogether. When the paper was eventually accepted, the editors forwarded Reviewer 1’s comments saying the paper was ready to publish. Reviewer 2 was nowhere to be found. Although I can only speculate, it seems like the editors didn’t bother to send the paper back to them. Good for them. I think that’s the kind of thing good editors should do. I suppose they could have sent it out to a third reviewer instead, but frankly I think that would have been a bad call. Reviewer 1’s comments were fine enough as-is to justify the editors’ decision. Of course, I’m not exactly a disinterested party–but still I think Reviewer 1 gave the editors more than enough to go on to make a responsible editorial decision.
    So, although this is just anecdotal, I would say: don’t grovel to an excessively harsh review (particularly if it is the perfunctory variety). Instead, address its substantive claims to whatever extent you can, and try to handle it with more grace than the reviewer did!
    That being said, I’m curious what other readers think. I expect this happens fairly often, and it would be great to hear how other authors deal with it.

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  15. Recovered from disappointments

    Thanks for all the kind words and suggestions. Eric above is right that a lot of the pain comes from that you are not sure yourself about whether the paper is good or bad, etc., and sort of rely on the referees to give the verdicts. To be fair, I do have a fair amount of publication experience, but still once in a while I am not sure about some papers as I imagine everyone is. Anyway, I feel better now. It is still a little painful to take in that some people consider my paper so very bad, whether or not they are right, but I am comforted by the help I got (both here and from the reports).

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  16. Tim

    I once received a rejection with a single reviewer report which says that my paper looks just like a good undergraduate work. The reviewer then tries to show that my paper is of little value by providing some very superficial reasons without discussing the main argument of the paper. This anonymous reviewer seems to be a mean-spirited person who is highly skillful at attacking another who has disagreements or conflicts of interest with her/him. I ignored the report and sent the paper to another journal; it was published.
    The above comments are interesting, and some very helpful to me. I also feel and agree with Marcus that “journal editors [should] edit out unnecessarily harsh language or tell reviewers that it’s unacceptable to write stuff like that”. I thank Marcus for the idea of “trying to cultivate a thick skin”, Eric for pointing out that “the absurdly harsh comments often say more about the referee than one’s paper”, ‘focus on what’s useful’ for “separate what is useful from what is not”, Daniel for “delete all the needlessly harsh stuff, all the irrelevant stuff, and all the unhelpful stuff”, and Andy for the discussion of “the incentive structures in reviewing”.
    I guess there are so many bad reviewer reports because the reviewer (or even editor) is sometimes in conflict of interest with the author, mostly professional interest, and occasionally philosophical interest.

    Reply

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