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In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
I was wondering if people can share stories about things that they regret publishing, or they they regret publishing how they did.
Interesting query. Do any readers have any stories to share?
There’s a part of me that regrets not aiming to place my first publication ( https://philpapers.org/rec/LASHTP ) in a journal that more people follow more closely because I think the paper would at this point have attracted more engagement.
At that point in my career, I just didn’t appreciate how much of the discipline’s limited attention is directed (for better or worse!) by heuristics for quality like various prestige markers. But the paper did a lot of other things for me, like provide a well-timed confidence boost and help me connect with the editors and other authors in the issue (it was a special issue organized topically) who share my research interests, so not all of me regrets it.
Mine is the opposite of Nick’s in a way. Last year I wrote a paper very quickly due to job market pressures to publish.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phpr.13065
I got it published within 4 months of starting to write it. I’m glad I got it in to a good journal and the thesis I argue for there is still my considered view on the matter (although I recognize that there is a lot of room for reasonable disagreement). I still find the main line of argument compelling.
The problem is that there are certain sentences that should have been more clear. There aren’t many but I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time obsessing over two of them. For instance, at one point in the paper I am trying to make a point about hierarchical organization. The point can be made in terms of receptive fields or in terms of tuning curves. In trying to explain this quickly, I make my claim about “receptive fields or tuning curves”. Unfortunately, my use of “or” sounds potentially appositive. It isn’t supposed to be: receptive fields and tuning curves are not the same thing. I don’t know if anyone even reads the paper and, if they do, whether they are distracted from the main argument by this. I’ve never heard anyone say they read it as an appositive, so for all I know everyone who has read it interpreted it as intended. But I regret my failure to anticipate the potential misunderstanding. I think my regret is amplified by the speed with which I wrote the paper.
I once published in a topic marked by interminable disagreement (because the debate there is yet another version of the objectivism/subjectivism debate that pops up all over ethics). I regret that. I made some points that I viewed to genuinely be moving the needle a bit (by clarifying the nature of the disagreement and what it would take for a new argument to, just for once, not beg the question). These points enjoyed approximately zero uptake. That paper now mostly lives in the obligatory early footnote dump as an example of views on one side of that divide. The intuition mongering pretty much persists unabated to this day.
I have a similar story to Spencer Paulson. I recently published a paper in a highly respected specialist journal that, in retrospect, is nowhere near clear or rigorous enough to adequately support the thesis that I was defending. The problem was that I was significantly pressed for time: the paper had already been rejected at other, more prestigious, journals and I needed to publish it before I submitted my tenure dossier. I am still broadly in agreement with the conclusion I reached in the paper, but if I had more time, my argument for it would have been quite different.
I did my PhD in a relatively small European department, where most senior faculty members, including my supervisors, were somewhat out of touch with Anglophone academic norms. As a result, I was advised to publish (admittedly poor) papers in very low-ranked or obscure journals. I’ve done much better since and learned a lot from those early missteps, but I still wonder how others view my CV.
I, too, have a similar story to Spencer Paulson. I’m a grad student and wanted to get something out and published before going on the market. I managed to get a term paper from a grad seminar into a respectable generalist journal. I still think the thesis is true and the argument is sound, but I’m no longer happy with how I wrote the paper. Had I written or edited it 6 months later (i.e., now), I would have cut probably 1/3 of the words. All-things-considered I’m glad to have it published, but thinking about it does make me cringe a little.
I don’t feel much regret, but I think that’s because I don’t feel much attachment. There are so many words I wish I could put differently. There are ideas I don’t feel strongly about.
There is a tendency to attribute a text to the author that runs deep in academia. However, as the other comments clearly show, texts are products of particular and contingent interactions between authors and circumstances. And I think it would be good if we all recognized that a lot more?interactions between authors and circumstances.
I published one of my best ideas in a fringe journal, because it promised quick turnaround, and I needed it to fill my publication quota for my first promotion review as a new untenured assistant prof. I was excessively afraid of making a bad first impression on my department colleagues by underpublishing. I’m pretty sure it was the wrong move.
Re. Shen-yi Liao’s comment, I agree this was an interaction between me and the circumstances. But it was still my decision to publish there (a mistaken one), and the core idea in the article was very much mine, even if not everything about the text was as I’d ideally put it or place it.
My very first publication (a reply piece) was (because it was my very first publication) written before I had figured out exactly how I wanted to do citations etc. The publication has many, many citations to two articles by Allen Buchanan.
Somehow when putting the paper into the final format for publication after it was accepted, I swapped those two titles, so all the citations to one are citations to the other, and vice versa.
It’s not a big deal because the page numbers are still accurate, and every single citation is swapped, so it’s not like half of them are right and the other half are messed up. But it does mean that there are like, 30 or 40 mistakes in that very short paper, forever!
I don’t think I’ve made similar mistakes since then because I reworked my Zotero workflow.
It’s not quite the same, but I’m currently in a strange situation where I have a paper under review which I worry I will regret!
To explain: I recently submitted a paper and received a very detailed, very critical R-and-R. I considered just pulling the paper, but ended up making lots of changes and resubmitting, partly because some of the comments seemed valid, but mainly because the editors had clearly gone to lengths to find reviewers, and I need a publication for my dossier. Chatting with some colleagues a few days ago, it became clear to me that the previous draft was much better than the new draft; I could have made a few changes based on the reviewers’ comments but left lots of the rest of the material untouched and ended up with a great paper (which, I guess, would have had to go elsewhere). But it seems too late to withdraw the paper now, so I’m half-hoping that the R-and-R will be rejected (although I also know that, if that does happen, I’ll be really annoyed!)
re R-and-R-regretter
I am very sympathetic to your situation. I had a paper that was sort of butchered by reviewers. I needed the publication though. Without the publication, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be competitive on the market. (And in hindsight, my perception was probably correct.)
I went with the revisions, and did everything required. It was published, and is now my most cited paper. But I wish people would just cite my dissertation for the unblemished version of the paper. I never force people to cite my dissertation though.
I hope you get a job without the pub. But if you do get the paper accepted, I hope there’s some opportunity, say, a book, where you can spell out the proper version of the paper.
All that being said, it is possible that we are just very bad at evaluating our own work.
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