My name is Dr. Crazy, and I have never recommended an article for publication. One time, I suggested that a revise and resubmit was appropriate. That felt pretty good. But just the once.
In every other case, in the eight or 9 years that I’ve been serving as a reader for a handful of journals, of greater and lesser prestige and selectivity, I have said that the articles that I have read are not acceptable for publication.
And honestly, that really hurts my feelings. I fantasize about the day when I get an article that I recommend to accept without changes, or to accept with only minor revisions. You think (or at least I thought) that when you finally get the chance to serve as a peer reviewer that it will be this exciting experience wherein you discover the next new most awesome ideas in your field, and you get to support them. But yeah, so far, not so much. And according to my Fb friends, they have similar experiences to report.
So, I’m writing this post as a public service for grad students or very junior people in literary studies (YMMV if you’re in another discipline, though I suspect this explanation might be quite appropriate in other humanities fields, especially, too) in order to offer some advice. Because it strikes me that when one first tries to publish, one really doesn’t have much idea of what a “publishable” piece actually is.
[Aside: I was VERY lucky as a grad student for two reasons: 1) my dissertation director, as well as some other profs in the program, commented on our seminar papers in “reader’s report” form, which felt like abuse at the time, but when I finally got my first reader’s reports back on stuff I submitted, it was totally clear to me that I had been trained to deal with that kind of criticism as well as to anticipate it; 2) for my first two publications, both completed in grad school and that appeared in edited collections, I had very generous editors who really worked with me to get my work to publishable standards and really explained the “why” behind what they were asking for. I know that everyone doesn’t have the benefit of these things – not even everybody in my own PhD program did, depending on the professors with whom they worked.]
First, what an article is not:
1. A seminar paper that you wrote for a graduate course is not an article. Not even if you got an “A” on it. (All an “A” means is that it was a very good seminar paper, excellent student work.) Not even if your professor said that the paper has “potential” to be published and you should think about submitting it someplace. (Implicit in that piece of encouragement is that you will revise the seminar paper to turn it into a journal article. It’s not ready, as is.)
2. A dissertation chapter is not an article. First off, dissertation chapters in my experience typically run longer than article-length. Even if you tend to have “shortish” (like 30-40 pages) chapters, as I myself did. Secondly, they typically involve a lot of “lit review” that “proves” you read a bunch of stuff, but which is extraneous to a tightly woven argument to be presented to an audience of experts. Third, if your dissertation is anything like mine, you might be picking fights with some critics, or dismissing out of hand the work of some critics, or uncritically praising the work of some critics, who are your potential reviewers, or the very good friends or very respected enemies of your potential reviewers. (The pool of people who work in any given subfield is very, very small: you need to be judicious and generous-without-being-fawning in your engagement with criticism, and judiciousness is often not a feature of the dissertation-writing process.) Fourth, no, you can’t just cut out the lit review and think because what you’re submitting is 25-30 pages that it is an article.
3. A conference paper is not an article. Not even if you’re submitting it to a very small journal that expects you to turn in something at around 2K words. Something intended to be read aloud to an audience is not dense enough or polished enough to appear without revision in published form. And certainly not if you’re submitting it to a journal that publishes stuff that falls in the 7K-words range. No, you can’t just “add to it.” A conference paper may be a skeleton of an article, or a piece of an article, or an idea for an article. But it’s not, indeed, an article.
Ok, but so then what does an actually publishable article involve?
1. Every article needs a clear, concise, precise thesis statement. An argument, if you will. And every piece of the body of that article should support and advance that argument, and the argument should develop and build through the accretion of evidence (primary – the literary text(s) -as well as secondary – theoretical, biographical, and/or critical material) and your analysis. If you are using sub-headings in lieu of actual transitions? You likely aren’t doing this. (Note: I’m not saying sub-headings are “wrong.” I’m just saying that if they are a substitute for strong transitions from one idea to the next, you’ve got a problem.)
2. Your argument should actually be original. Not just original to you. (That’s student work, and fine as far as it goes, but it’s not scholarship.) Here’s what I mean when I say this. When I was an undergraduate, I did my honors thesis on Virginia Woolf and her androgynous aesthetic. Now, what I had to say was like totally original to me. But was I making an original contribution to the scholarly conversation on Virginia Woolf, and taking that conversation to a new place? NO! I WASN’T! What I was thinking about was “new to me,” and I learned how to write in a more advanced way by doing that project, but it was NOT scholarship! If you are “cherry-picking” quotes that “agree” with your argument, or that “disagree” with your argument, but you’re not deeply reading the body of the criticism and really thinking about it? You’re likely in trouble. Original scholarship is often ambivalent in relation to the body of criticism – it’s not Yes! or No!
3. You should be able to show where your original ideas came from. How do you build on, complicate, reject, or enhance the existing body of criticism? What are the foundations of your ideas, and how do you grow out of those foundations? How do you grow away from them? How does your close reading of the literary text(s) substantiate what you have to say about the scholarly conversation? As I tell my students, writing good literary criticism actually has a lot in common with doing geometry. It’s not enough to present a “right answer” – you’ve got to demonstrate the “proof” – you’ve got to “show your work.” Put another way, you need to articulate your thought process, and in doing so, persuade your reader that what you’re thinking is worthwhile, even if they disagree with your approach.
And what would you be best advised to avoid?
1. Avoid submitting essays in which you substitute quotations for your own ideas. Don’t create a collage in which other scholars, or, indeed, even Esteemed Great Writers of Literature, speak for you. And, no, it does not make a difference if you italicize phrases to “add emphasis.”
2. Avoid submitting sloppy work. Parallel construction of sentences matters. Punctuation matters. Citation style matters. Proofreading and spelling matter. And in this age of computers? If you have sentence-level problems like this I just think that you are lazy. No, I will not read past consistent errors with these things when I am reviewing for a journal to see your undying brilliance. I’ll think you’re an asshole who is wasting everybody’s time. Nobody is brilliant enough for this not to be irritating. It’s also worth noting: in non-blind-review situations, one sometimes gets stuff like this from Eminent Folks. It’s still fucking maddening, though one puts up with it because the person is Eminent. But if you’re not Eminent? Seriously, let the article sit a few days and then do some editing. [Confession: I know I submitted something like this (sloppy citations, baggy writing) in December that I am sure was maddening for my editors of an essay collection that I was “invited” (compelled, as a favor, and while I would never describe myself as eminent, I have earned the right to fuck up periodically at this point) to submit to. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t up to my usual standards, and I actually felt badly about it, but given the timing and that I hadn’t intended to write anything for this particular thing originally, I cut myself what felt like necessary slack at the time. The point is, though, I knew it was shitty even as I hit “send.” And when I revised the piece for the editors, I made damned sure that I didn’t pull the same shit again. I suppose this is one of the privileges of being “invited” to submit to something, and having the reputation to make that invitation worth it for the people putting the thing together, but what I did still sucks, and I want to note that I know it sucks and that I’m sorry for it.)
3. Avoid submitting to inappropriate journals. Seriously, do your homework. Just because you’re writing on a “novel” don’t think that your article is necessarily appropriate for the journal, “Novel: A Forum on Fiction” (a VERY selective journal). This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t aim high, but you should also be realistic about the quality of your work, the orientation of your work in relation to what the journal typically publishes, and the audience for whom that work would be interesting and significant. The article that I read today was for Fancy Journal (Comparatively) Related to Single Author (not the smaller “newsletter” style journal for that author). One of the major problems with that article was that it didn’t seem to realize that the only people who read that journal regularly are all experts on that author, who all have all the most famous passages of Single Author’s writing (not just the fiction, but also the diaries, letters, and all published materials) pretty much memorized, and they also have read ALL of the scholarship on Single Author. Submitting your work to the appropriate journal, and with that journal’s typical audience in mind, makes a HUGE difference. Here’s a tip: if you never cite anything from the journal you’re thinking about submitting your essay to in your essay? DON’T SUBMIT THERE. If YOU are not their audience, why would their readers be the audience for your work? Here’s another tip: if you’re thinking about submitting to the Fanciest Journal in Your Field, from which you cite articles consistently in your own work but which you know only has like an 8% acceptance rate, expect to revise and to submit it to a lower tier journal next. (And if you don’t know how to figure out the typical acceptance rate of the journals to which you submit, you need to figure that out before you submit anyplace – hint, the MLA publishes this info.) The best case scenario typically if you submit to one of the Top Journals is that if your work is good, you’ll get great readers’ reports to work from for your revision for a less selective venue, so it’s not a waste of your time or theirs, even if rejection is your fate. But rejection will likely be your fate, and you should know that.
And finally:
1. Most of the people I know take their responsibilities as peer reviewers really seriously and they do their best to offer constructive comments for revision, even if they recommend rejection. They don’t JUST say, “this is a piece of shit.”
2. In submitting articles, even those that have been rejected, I would say that 95% of the time I received constructive comments that only made the article that I submitted better. Even if I felt on first reading that the comments indicated, “this is a piece of shit.” And yeah, sometimes I resist some of the comments, but I provide my rationale, and that has always been ok. Or I address a comment that I think is not central in a note, but it doesn’t HURT anything for me to do that, and it makes the reviewer happy. The point is, getting a work to publication is collaborative. And taking the criticism you get never (in my experience) makes the essay worse.
3. If you’re doing conscientious, non-sloppy, original work, you really will get feedback that improves not only your writing but also your ideas, and a lot of times you’ll end up with a publication. Nobody is out to get you. As I often say to my students, when they get all paranoid that a certain professor (other than me, or even me) is out to get them: “I promise you they have other things that they are much more worried about than you. They are not staying up at night because of your crappy paper. ” Nobody who is serving as a peer reviewer is staying up at night because of your crappy article. I promise you. But they will be over the moon if you write an article that they can recommend for publication. Seriously, that is a rare and wonderful thing.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
Another small tip: the MLA style now requires that you put Print or Web at the end of each bibliographic entry. DO IT, or I’ll be inclined to reject the article without even reading it (I received a manuscript like that a month ago from a very fancy journal)
Spanish Prof – if the journal follows current MLA style – TOTALLY! That said, most of the journals I submit to have their “own” version of MLA Style which is a bizarre amalgam of MLA and Chicago… basically, follow the style of the journal to which you are submitting or you will get rejected! Life is too short for your reviewers!
I think most of the journals in my field require straight MLA.
This is awesome, and so needs to be said (and heard). I too have never recommended publication for an article — though like you I spend a lot of time trying to give detailed, constructive feedback even to articles that are totally not ready for prime time.
I also heartily second the advice not to send to a journal one doesn’t read. There’s a niche journal in my field that isn’t the fanciest CV line, but it’s absolutely the place to get work on a certain topic read by the most learned and thoughtful experts on that topic. But I’ve heard, rather recently, someone speak slightingly of that journal as somewhere they might send a cast-off bit of their book that they’re not motivated to revise to send somewhere better. Uh, no.
Some articles are slight little things, and that’s fine: not every article needs to set the world on fire. But everything you send out should be quality work you’re proud of.
As someone writing my first article for publication, your comment that you’ve never recommended anything is scary! However, I was little cheered by your comment about citing the journal you’re applying to: on the recommendation of my adviser, I’m shooting high, for Fancy Journal, and I’d noticed that about 3/4 of the articles ever published on my semi-obscure text were in Fancy Journal. I’d thought that would be a disadvantage, and that maybe I should submit elsewhere, but it sounds like it could, maybe, be a very good thing.
Another bit of advice: pick the journal(s) you want to submit a piece to, and study 2-3 articles published in those journals. How are they organized? What kinds of rhetorical moves do they make? What typically happens in the introduction? How discursive (or not) are the notes? Are articles typically divided into subsections, and if so, do the sections get titles or just numbers? Undoubtedly there will be some variation, but if they all do the 20-pages-straight-through thing and you have 8 titled sub-sections (or vice versa), there’s a disconnect. And you might think that an introduction always does the same kind of work, but analysis of assorted journals shows that that isn’t really true.
tl;dr: you’re not writing “an article” but “an article for Journal X.” Focus on what Journal X wants.
This is fascinating. Can you give me a sense of how many articles you review per year? I limit my reviewing to about 12 per year, and I have a much higher acceptance rate. However, I imagine this must be due to the difference in fields, since I’m in science – presumably the scale is just different?
I really like this. I think every graduate student should read this.
I have also never recommended publication when I have reviewed, though I have done a few revise-and-resubmit requests.
But: My experience with working with editors (and reader’s reports) has not been as positive on the receiving end. Actually it has mostly sucked (I tend to get two polarizing reports, and it’s possible to follow one of their suggestions but not the other and I end up doing multiple rounds of revisions after acceptance or wind up changing the article so much it’s really not “mine” anymore). I’m at the point, honestly, I don’t want to submit an article to a journal EVER AGAIN. And I say this as an associate prof at an R1…
I am in sciences/engineering, and I review about 3-4 papers per month, plus am an associate editor of a specialty journal.
Most of mine are “reconsider following major revisions” or flat-out rejections (unsuitable for journal, wrong, etc.), the latter more common in highfalutin journals; a few are minor revisions. I don’t think I have ever accepted anything without changes on first submission.
My name is Dr. Crazy, and I have never recommended an article for publication. One time, I suggested that a revise and resubmit was appropriate. That felt pretty good. But just the once.
In every other case, in the eight or 9 years that I’ve been serving as a reader for a handful of journals, of greater and lesser prestige and selectivity, I have said that the articles that I have read are not acceptable for publication.
[My name is Flavia, and] I too have never recommended publication for an article — though like you I spend a lot of time trying to give detailed, constructive feedback even to articles that are totally not ready for prime time.
Maybe this is a field thing, but this sounds absolutely bizarre to me. Are the two of you only getting dregs to review?
Because I have peer-reviewed many, many papers over the years, and while I have almost never recommended publication as is, I have frequently recommended extensive revisions, and then recommended publication after reviewing the resubmitted revised version.
I think it’s very much a field-specific thing, and I would put it down to two issues:
1) Literary studies is a “book field,” which has all sorts of consequences in terms of training, the “status” of journal articles relative to books, etc.
2) It’s very rare that an article recounts a “discovery” of a new text, or something equally “concrete” – basically, when we publish, we publish ideas/interpretations. Because that’s the case, it’s very rare that one can separate form from content when we review. (This is also why we read our conference papers rather than talking them. Sloppy or informal argumentation and analysis basically makes a contribution to the field impossible.)
Great advice! I have two articles out for consideration right now — not sure when I’ll hear anything (maybe next year). The scholarly journal I worked for never accepted any articles without revisions, so I am prepared for plenty of revision, though I’m steeling myself for rejection. It’s a tough field. I’m just proud that I’m managing to do research with a 4/4 load, tons of service requirements, and, you know, two little kids.
I think it’s very much a field-specific thing, and I would put it down to two issues[.]
I guess I still don’t understand. If you and Flavia’s experiences are not idiosyncratic, then from a statistical standpoint, it implies that the vast majority of submitted papers in your field never get published. Is that correct?
In terms of percentage acceptance rates (which tend to be low in the top ranked humanities journals- less than 10%), the vast majority of work doesn’t get published. But usually what happens is that people revise after rejection and send it somewhere else and then they get published elsewhere. Sometimes, this happens over and over again. I know plenty of people who’ve been rejected four, five more times before they get published (but these are people trying to get into top journals and there is usually a cut-off point when people cut their losses and go somewhere lower ranked). As an editor, I’ve also had reviewers tell me that they’ve now reviewed that same article 3 times for different places!
As someone who edits a relatively low-ranking history journal (but one that has a niche and does it’s job well etc), we reject about a third of entrants before peer review for fundamental problems (usually non-academics who misunderstand what an academic journal is – possibly a unique history problem – and papers that are effectively conference papers or similar or just really bad). The rest go for peer review. About 20% are then rejected and the rest are R&R. Many of these never come back to us, so we end up publishing about 30% of all submissions, maybe less. As an editor, I’ve only ever seen one outright acceptance and even that said ‘here are some suggestions, but these are only suggestions’, and that was not for this journal, but for a special issue I edited for an A-ranked journal. The history journal that I’m on the board for, but don’t edit, report similar numbers.
I tend to find that the worst offenders are ‘new’ scholars, learning the trade, but the editors of the journal I’m on the board for say they also have a similar problem with lazy senior people, who think they don’t have to put the work in, and they find many of the early career people quite conscientious and thorough – so what the problem is, is not clear. In my head, I imagine that the people who edit the A-ranked stuff would get better quality productions, but a friend of mine who does that says, they get a lot of poor quality stuff too, but they just reject immediately and don’t waste time with it.
And now in what amounts to boasting, despite all of this, I’ve received (only) two outright acceptances for articles in top journals in my whole career. Both were rejected from other top places and revised before this, which is probably why, but it can happen!
CPP, yeah, I actually think that’s true. Mainly because we don’t care about journal articles the way that we care about books, so I suspect a lot of people just don’t bother to revise and submit elsewhere when they get a rejection, or, as FA said, even to resubmit when they’ve been given an R&R.
Look at it this way: at an R1 in literary studies, two articles a year for a scholar would be considered productive (plus whatever ongoing book projects they have going on). At a place like mine, you can get tenure with just a couple or three articles total – and we don’t require a book.
And, as FA said, people who are really committed to getting a piece published might circulate it to three or four different journals before it finds a home, so that does skew the percentages of accepted/rejected articles a bit.
FA – thanks for weighing in with your comment! I think you explain how submitting/reviewing/editing happens in humanities journals really, really well!
FA really nails it, though I think you’re right (Dr. C) about the ways that prioritizing a book MS affects the things that get sent out as articles. I’ve twice reviewed book MSS or proposals, and both times I recommended publication with only doable revisions. (They were both idiosyncratic projects, and that’s only two data points — but it’s still a striking contrast to what I’ve seen in article submissions.)
I should also add, to CCP, that the journal I most frequently review for is a lower-tier venue with a peculiar set of emphases that I suspect inspires people whose work isn’t as scholarly (the journal does publish some good stuff, but a lot of weird things come in over the transom). As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I also think that the more niche a venue is, the more likely it is to get people who are just throwing stuff out there, hoping for a publication.
Still, the couple of times I’ve reviewed for big-name journals I also haven’t seen especially strong work.
To be frank, I’ve read a lot of published turds, too. So not all of the crap gets rejected. A fair amount gets published. Now — who the hell reviewed that stuff? 🙂
One thing that I’d like to add to this conversation is that nowadays, we’re told that we need at least one, if not two, articles placed to be fairly competitive on the job market. I’d bet that that contributes to the poor quality of the initial submissions (grad students/adjuncts etc are likely frantically submitting as soon as they have something semi-solid on paper so they can at least say they have something ‘under submission,’). But I’ve heard a lot of my fellow grad students/adjuncts comment that in a way, the rejections can be some of the most useful things they receive, because readers’ reports can represent some of the most detailed feedback they’re likely to get, and it’s fantastically useful for revising the piece for the next place you’re sending it out to. Please, keep up all those careful readers’ reports–even if it’s depressing that you’re not able to accept most articles, we really appreciate the feedback!
@Fie- I think that’s caused by poor editing. There is no doubt that some peer reviewers are harsher than others and some subfields are definitely more stringent on each other than others. However, a good editor should look to have a similar quality of articles across each issue (presuming that they’re getting a decent number of submissions). But, some editors are more swayed by peer review that others – they feel they can’t ignore the recommendation from peer review. I think this is a bad strategy, because if you followed recommendations (ie to accept, reject, R&R) too stringently, you end up rejecting really nice pieces and accepting mediocre ones. In fairness though, it’s much easier to ‘bump up’ a reject to an R&R, than to reject something that’s got good feedback.
Fie:
In thinking about the “bad” articles I’ve read (and I too have read plenty!), they’re still, usually, different from what Dr. Crazy is describing. They may cover no new ground or make an argument that I find persuasive, but they’re basically polished and look right, and it’s plausible to me that someone who doesn’t do what I do (that is, know the esoteric material I know in the depth that I know it) might find them interesting and original. But since I work on lesser-studied works, YMMV.
Reblogged this on Ernest Phillip Henry Clay Yates Kehoe Head Cordell and commented:
This is why I don’t submit: I’ve not had the leisure since I was a graduate student; and I don’t work in a field that encourages it, though many could benefit from our experience if there were a journal with the right target audience (I’m not saying there isn’t — that in itself is a research project). This is the second time today that I’ve been able to boil down something I’ve read into, “If you’re going to do X — be prepared to do a little work.” My first thought on this article was that submitters to such a peer-reviewer should take a lesson from the recycling industry — some material must be broken down into its constituent parts in order to be recycled. Some assembly may be required. If it is fluid, pour it into the correct mould.
It happens sometimes that articles that over the time will become seminal in its field, have received many rejections before being accepted for publication. That was the case of the article in which the late American biologist Lynn Margulis proposed her theory of endosymbiosis, currently widely accepted. Margulis wrote later that her first paper on endosymbiosis got about 15 rejections until it was accepte by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. As associate editor of a microbiology journal, I see every year many manuscripts and I cannot remember anyone that has been published without at least minor revisions, which does not mean that the contents are bad. The problem is that most universities do not teach to their students, who are future researchers, how to write a scientific paper. This is something that they must learn on the job –if they ever learn it.
My impression is that there are so many bad articles because dissertation students and untenured professors are overly cautious. It is part of the process of being housebroken into becoming a pliant tool of the academy.
Thank you for posting this! Like Canuck I am a phd student working on my first published article. The deeper into writing/revising I go the more I recognize the disconnect between publishable work and well-done class papers. I wish there were more transparency about the process, but like you’ve all said, at least the review process helps to teach us novices what even counts as publication worthy material. Posts like these help a ton on the front end of the work though 🙂
Creating cool blog is not harder than creating great information. But you know that you done both incredibly well. Thank man.
Since literary studies has no content, Dr. Crazy is entirely correct.
Another thing we should all bear in mind is that peer review is frustratingly difficult for everyone involved. The professors reviewing the articles aren’t paid for that work, it’s “service” they often have to squeeze into an already-packed workload. The people submitting the articles often wait months for reviewers to complete their end of things. In my experience, reviewers often widely disagree about an essay’s quality — in fact, of the past few pieces I sent out for review, each one ended up requiring 3 reviewers (and therefore taking longer to review) because of the first 2, one thought they weren’t publishable and one thought they were. In each case, the 3rd person ultimately rejected the article — but what is upsetting is that in each case the one who accepted the article (in each case, with revisions, of course) was VERY enthusiastic about it. Journal editors ought to get more involved in such cases, rather than relying solely on the recommendations of the peer reviewers — if someone found the article to be particularly good, perhaps a revise and resubmit is in order, rather than an outright rejection. I also had a case in which the scholar reviewing my article rejected it outright because [that scholar] disagreed with my argument, but in the reviewer’s comments wrote that the essay was sophisticated, well-written, and had made [the scholar] think of the subject in a very different way, disagreement notwithstanding — perhaps in such cases, an R and R would be more appropriate than an outright rejection as well. Truthfully, I don’t mind rejection, especially when the reviewer’s comments point out real flaws in my work and cause me to rethink it in productive ways. But rejection made primarily on the grounds of “I didn’t agree with it” or “you didn’t cite the right people” or “this doesn’t follow the current discussion on the subject” rather than “it is an unacceptable piece of scholarship” seem to be on the rise — and are easily handled in revision, if given the chance. However, when you have peer reviewers sitting on the advisory board for multiple journals who are, themselves, eminent scholars with busy schedules, essays don’t always get careful reading, and that’s a flaw in the system wherein the same people are asked to review too many pieces. Revise and resubmit seems to be a dying thing; with so many submissions, peer reviewers seem to be shifting to a thinking model of, “either it can be published as-is or with very minor changes, or it shouldn’t be published at all and the scholar can try to work out the problems and send it elsewhere.” I have much better luck publishing in edited collections where the editor is invested in helping me develop the piece into what s/he wants it to be — which used to be how several journals functioned, but seems to be the case no longer.
This paper from an egomaniac should not be on the internet.
It is full of perverse narcissism.