The Philosophers' Cocoon

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

Let’s say one tries to publish a paper that engages with a fairly small and semi-isolated area of literature, but keeps getting negative referee reports on it (seemingly written by people who know about the area/topic in question). At some point, one will either (a) run out of journals that are willing to publish stuff on this topic, or (b) run out of reviewers who are willing to take on the manuscript (or both!). Given that many areas of literature are small and that we’re in a refereeing crisis, I’m curious as to how often this situation arises, and what one can do about it. Should one simply to abandon the paper and move on, assuming that one can afford to do so, of course? Or is it better to try journals that seem far less interested in the topic, at least on the surface?

I guess I think it’s hard to say for sure without knowing more about the paper and the nature of the negative reports. I’ve had papers like this that I gave up on, but that was because I was convinced by the nature of the reports themselves that the paper’s flaws made it a lost cause. On the other hand, I have a paper or two that received numerous rejections that left me unconvinced–and I ended up publishing those after numerous revisions. So, I guess I think it depends on one’s judgment of whether the paper really is a lost cause, or whether it might have a better chance after revisions. It may also depend on one’s tolerance for sending the paper to lower-ranked or unranked journals.

What do readers think?