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Are incremental papers rejected by journals less than bold ones?

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

Looking back through my submission history, I noticed a pattern: my incremental papers on well-trodden topics received far fewer rejections and much more sympathetic referee reports than my attempts to defend bold, ambitious, or unprecedented claims.

I’m curious whether this is just my anecdotal experience or a more general pattern in academic publishing. And there’s a related, more pragmatic question I’d welcome thoughts on: should early-career philosophers who need publications to survive avoid writing ambitious papers defending unprecedented claims? Curious to hear others’ experiences.

Interesting question, and I too am curious to hear from others. I haven’t kept a thorough record of my submission history, but my sense is that things have been the opposite for me. I’ve seemed to have more trouble placing incremental papers (perhaps because they’re less interesting?)

What about other readers?

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11 responses to “Are incremental papers rejected by journals less than bold ones?”

  1. Anonymous

    Also a junior person here, and I have had almost exactly the same experience as OP.

    I have chosen to spend most of my time on ambitious papers: pieces that try to introduce new theories, rethink long-standing questions, or put new issues on the philosophical map. Some of these papers have eventually done well, including at very good journals. But the path has been much slower and more punishing than it seems to be for more incremental work. The ambitious papers have taken many more rounds of rejection, revision, and resubmission before finding a home, while I have watched more debate-internal or extension-style papers move much more quickly through the system. For an early-career person, that difference matters a lot: the time it takes for ambitious work to be recognized can create real job-market vulnerability.

    What worries me is not simply that ambitious papers are harder to publish. That is to be expected. The deeper worry is that some current journal practices may unintentionally discourage ambitious work. In particular, many top journals now seem to operate with a very strict norm: if one referee recommends rejection, the paper is rejected, even when the other reports are strongly positive. I have had papers receive two very strong reports — sometimes recommending minor revisions or even acceptance, and engaging seriously with the paper’s contribution — only to be killed by a third negative verdict with little or no substantive comment.

    For genuinely new work, this is a serious problem. If a paper is trying to introduce a new framework or open a new line of inquiry, disagreement among referees is not always evidence that the paper is bad. Sometimes it is exactly what one should expect. Incremental papers on well-established debates are often easier to evaluate by existing standards: referees know the literature, know the dialectic, and can more readily see where the contribution fits. Ambitious work often has to teach the reader how to evaluate it. That makes it riskier, but it is also part of what makes it potentially valuable.

    So I wonder whether journals should rethink what deserves an R&R rather than a straight rejection. I am not suggesting that journals should publish half-baked work just because it sounds ambitious. But when a paper receives one or two highly positive, deeply engaged reports, and the main problem is that another referee is unconvinced, that seems like a paradigm case for an R&R — especially if the paper is trying to do something genuinely new. It seems unfortunate if the default response is to reject, forcing the author to send the same paper to three or four more journals, where the process repeats.

    This is not only bad for authors. It may also increase the burden on journals as a whole. If an ambitious paper is rejected at one journal despite serious support from some referees, it will simply be submitted elsewhere, requiring new editors and new referees to start the process again. A more generous use of R&R for ambitious but imperfect work might actually reduce total editorial labor across journals, because promising papers would be developed where they first receive serious uptake rather than being circulated repeatedly through the system.

    More generally, I think top journals should ask not only whether a paper receives unanimous referee enthusiasm, but also whether it has the potential to make a distinctive and lasting contribution. Some less ambitious papers are extremely polished and easy to accept; some ambitious papers are more difficult, more polarizing, and require more editorial judgment. But if top journals are supposed to publish work that moves the discipline forward, then originality and ambition should count for more in deciding when a paper deserves further development.

    This is why professional editorial judgment matters. If the decision procedure is effectively “reject unless all reports are positive,” then editors are not really exercising much philosophical judgment. They are aggregating verdicts. But ambitious work often needs exactly the kind of judgment that can distinguish a confused paper from a difficult but potentially important one. That seems especially important if top journals are meant to publish work that does more than competently extend existing debates.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    If more ambitious papers are more difficult to publish, then we should expect to see that top top journals publish less groundbreaking papers compared to great but not top journals.

    And here are just my two cents. I do feel that in the subfield of political philosophy, the top top journal publishes less fun stuff than great but not the top journals. To clarify, the top top one still publishes lots of fun stuff, but just feel not as much as others.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    In my experience, the key with a bold paper is to realize that your referees will probably not be convinced by it. The goal is to look like an R&R rather than a reject. The way to do that is to keep the paper tight and not address too many potential objections. Then the referees will think you have room to address the objections they happen to think are important, instead of thinking “wow, there are so many objections to this view, and the author didn’t even address the most important one!” This approach earned me some agonizing R&R processes but they did all lead to publications. And I got to publish the bolder ideas I really wanted to write about. Just always with a couple of very thorough discussions of objections that I didn’t actually think we’re all that important…

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I’ve found that sometimes you can preempt an annoying unimportant objection near the beginning of the paper in only a few sentences, even in a footnote, and convince the reviewer that’s it’s unimportant to begin with, instead of needing to take it seriously when it’s already a huge snowball at the end of the paper. Worked for me a few times.

      Reply
  4. Anonymous

    Two hypotheses that are worth taking seriously, I think: (i) ambitious papers are more difficult to do well; and (ii) ambitious papers need to be longer. (In fact, I think both are true.) This explains the pattern while requiring only that journals tend to reject worse papers more often, on average, than good papers and apply higher standards to longer papers.

    Reply
  5. Daniel

    I don’t think I’ve published enough to be able to weigh in, but I do have a vague sense that my bolder stuff is having a harder time finding a home than my incremental stuff. In my subfields of ethics and political philosophy, I feel like the top ethics journals (and the top ethics publications in top generalist journals) skew more incremental than one might like, whereas in political philosophy there’s a decent amount of bold stuff.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    I guess we don’t know about the systematicity unless we run some sort of study on this, but anecdotally, I very much had this experience, too.

    That said, I do think I got my jobs due to the ‘bold’ papers, not due to the incremental ones. Although I guess this is trivially true, because I never submitted the incremental ones as writing samples / gave them as job talks… I can’t imagine that someone is very impressed by a very incremental paper as a writing sample though.

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    I think this question is a bit hard to answer because “bold” and “incremental” are very broad categories, and different people will probably carve them up differently. In any case, I think that one difficulty with incremental papers as that reviewers/editors may question whether it’s novel or interesting enough to be worth publishing. In contrast, a bolder paper is (at least to many reviewers) inherently more interesting, as long as it’s executed sufficiently well. As someone who mainly tends to favor the bold stuff, my experience has been similar to that of one of the commenters above—not exceptionally hard to get an R&R, but the revision process can be grueling.

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  8. Michel

    I wouldn’t characterize any of my work as ‘bold’ (nor ‘incremental,’ either!), but my experience is absolutely that counterintuitive or unusual work faces a very tough uphill climb.

    Reply
  9. Anon

    I must admit I’ve given up trying to publish ambitious stuff in fancy journals. The whole system is a machine for the self-promotion of a few commercial institutions (publishers and so-called top departments in symbiosis), driven by a neocolonialist agenda. The more people, including policy makers, realize this, the sooner this unjust system will be history.

    Reply
  10. Anon

    I’ve also had the opposite experience from the OP. I struggle to publish my incremental stuff. I’ve been told more than once by the editor that the paper isn’t ambitious enough and papers that start debates rather than being part of existing ones are favored.

    Reply

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