The Rejection Carousel: How did I get on this ride and when can I get off it?

Opening

I want to tell you a story. It’s a little embarrassing, but I want to tell you anyway.

I had been publishing for several years. Not struggling—publishing. Papers were going out, getting accepted, moving through the process. I felt confident.

Then I wrote a paper I was really excited about. Mixed methods, years of fieldwork, findings I thought mattered. I submitted it to the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. It was immediately rejected. I revised the language, tightened the organization, and submitted to Social Networks. Rejected again. I went back to the paper and did what I’d been doing: revised, reorganized, edited. Then submitted to Social Networks a second time.

The editor rejected it, but this time wrote back. The research was robust, he said. Timely. But I needed to learn how to write a journal paper. He recommended a book.

I stared at that email for a while. I had a PhD. I have three published papers and had reviewed manuscripts for about a dozen journals at that point. And now an editor had handed me remedial homework.

I didn’t know it then, but that email was a turning point. Rejection in academic life isn’t one event; it’s an ecosystem. Personal, physical, expensive, invisible, institutional, systemic. And most of us are deep inside it before we even realize.

Rejection is personal

Last year I received an R&R that hit deep. Reviewer 3 had four comments. The other two reviewers had carefully critiqued pages. Reviewer 3 had four comments.

1. The introduction is very long and risks losing the reader. Fine.
2. You should better justify your choices. Which choices?
3. The figures are truly terrible. Truly.
4. The results seem very self-referential.

I stared at those four sentences. I was immediately defensive: the introduction is long because the context requires it, the figures were low resolution because it was a first submission, the results are self-referential because that’s what results are. Then I got angry. Then I felt afraid. Because what if Reviewer 3 was right? What if the other two reviewers were being kind and this one was being honest?

Why does this one voice speak so loudly in my head?

That sequence — defensive, angry, afraid — was not my personal failing. It’s what happens when feedback arrives without context, without accountability, and without the basic courtesy of specificity. I can’t revise “truly terrible.” I can only absorb it.

This is rejection at its most personal: not the form letter from the editor, but the voice that gets inside. The one that sounds, uncomfortably, like the voice I already half-hear before submitting.

That internal voice is where the carousel starts. Before the journal weighs in, before the reviewers convene, before anyone outside my own head has seen the work — the rejection is already running. The paper isn’t ready. The argument isn’t strong enough. Who am I to be adding to this conversation?

We call this imposter syndrome as though naming it resolves it. It doesn’t. What it actually is: a rational adaptation to an evaluative environment that withholds information, moves goalposts, and occasionally hands you a reviewer who thinks your figures are truly terrible without telling you why. The internal voice learned from the external one. It just kept going after the external one went quiet.

Check out: The Stigma of Asking for Help

The personal rejection has the longest reach of all the stops on this carousel. External rejections are periodic. The internal one runs on a loop.

Rejection is physical

Where does rejection sit in your body?

I know where it sits in mine. A sharp pain in my right shoulder blade. It shows up when I look at a looming deadline. When I realize the analysis I have doesn’t quite support the argument I’m making. When I try to make sense of contradictory reviewer comments — or even just grapple with which journal to submit to next. Before any external verdict has arrived, before anyone has said yes or no, my shoulder blade already knows something is at stake.

This is not metaphor. This is my nervous system doing its job.

My body processes threat before my brain has a chance to contextualize it. Social rejection and physical danger travel the same neural pathways; the alarm that fires when I open a rejection email is not categorically different from the alarm that fires when I step into traffic. The brain catches up eventually and says: this is just a journal, this is just a reviewer, this is just an email. But my body has already been there for several seconds, doing what it learned to do.

Which is why avoidance is so often misread. We call it procrastination. We call it laziness. We call it a motivation problem. But it’s really just the body protecting us from anticipated pain. If opening emails from journals has historically produced a specific physical experience, the nervous system will find reasons not to open them. That’s adaptation, not avoidance.

Check out: Why don't you just write?

And it doesn’t have to be a rejection email. It can be the weight of a submission cycle lived in the body for months — the low hum of waiting, the hypervigilance of checking your inbox, the particular exhaustion that follows a harsh review that is disproportionate to the twenty minutes you spent reading it. The body was working the whole time. It just wasn’t accounted for.

The next time you find yourself avoiding the paper, check in before you diagnose yourself. Where is it sitting? What is it actually telling you?

Rejection is expensive

Nobody tells you about the time cost.

The rule of thumb for tenure track is one paper per year. It sounds manageable until you do the actual math. A paper takes three months to write if you’re focused and nothing sidetracks you (good luck with that). Then you submit. Then you wait for acknowledgement, for a desk decision, for reviewers to be assigned, for reviewers to actually review. Early in my career I didn’t think carefully about how long any of this took. I had one paper sit in a journal’s backlog for two years between acceptance and publication. The paper was three years old by the time anyone could cite it.

That’s not unusual. It’s just not talked about.

Rejection adds cost at every stage. A desk rejection is relatively cheap; painful, but fast. You lose the submission window and the hope you’d invested, but you can resubmit elsewhere within weeks. The expensive rejection is the one that comes after six months of review, asks for major revisions, and then rejects the revision six months later. You have spent a year on a paper that is now back at the beginning. The cover letter needs rewriting. The formatting needs adjusting for a new journal’s style guide. The argument might need repositioning for a different audience. And the clock, for those on tenure track or fixed-term contracts, has kept moving the entire time.

I learned over time to overlap writing and submitting multiple papers simultaneously, so that the waiting periods on one don’t stall everything else. I learned to check journals’ published timelines: time to first decision, time from submission to review, how long reviewers are given to respond. These numbers are often on the journal website and almost nobody looks at them. I learned that some editors are simply slow…not because they don’t care but because they might be associate professors carrying a full load, and editorial work sits low on their promotion benchmarks.

None of this is secret information. It’s just information that we often don’t think about or overlook, yet the cost of not having it is measured in years.

Check out: 13 reasons papers get rejected

Rejection is invisible

There is no cultural script for a desk rejection.

Nobody brings you food. Nobody asks how you’re holding up. Nobody knows to ask. The grief of a rejection or of a paper you couldn’t finish (or a submission you delayed for six months because the anxiety of sending it out was worse than the anxiety of sitting on it) doesn’t have a public form. It lives in you silently, while everything around you keeps moving.

I was married to someone who didn’t understand this. He knew I published. He had watched papers go out and come back and go out again and eventually get published. So why, he wanted to know, was I so anxious about the process? You’ve done this before. You’re good at it. The logic was reasonable. The logic was wrong. In a way I didn’t have the language to explain at the time.

The anxiety wasn’t about whether I could do it. It was about what it cost every time. The waiting. The exposure. The vulnerability of sending something I believed in out into a system that evaluates it anonymously and returns judgment without explanation. That cost doesn’t go away with experience. If anything it compounds, because the more you’ve published the more you have to lose, and the more Reviewer 3 sounds like a voice you’ve been trying to ignore for years.

My marriage didn’t survive, for reasons that were never only about academic writing. But I can say this: my weight was burdened by his rejection too. The carousel was running at home as well as at work. And being misread by someone who loves you is a lonelier experience than being misread by a stranger.

This is what invisible rejection looks like. Not the email from the editor. The dinner table. The unanswered question of why this still gets to you. The grief that has no name and therefore no container and therefore no end.

The people around you are not trying to get it wrong. They just don’t have the map. And most of us don’t hand it to them, because we’re not sure we have it ourselves.

Rejection is institutional

I once sat in a department meeting and watched a PowerPoint slide go up on the screen. It was comparing citation metrics across departments. Our department (a design program) was near the bottom. The slide had come from the provost’s office. The message was clear: publish or perish.

There was no acknowledgement of why the numbers looked the way they did.

Design research, like social science research, like mixed methods research, like qualitative research, publishes differently than lab-based quantitative science. The journals are different. The citation cultures are different. The timelines are different. A paper in a high-impact biomedical journal will accumulate citations at a rate that a paper in a design or urban studies journal simply will not — not because the work is less rigorous or less important, but because the field is smaller, the readership is more specialized, and the metrics are poorly calibrated for it.

The h-index. The impact factor. The citation count. These are not neutral instruments. They were developed in and for specific disciplines and have been applied universally as though disciplinary context is irrelevant. When a provost’s office uses them to rank departments side by side, what looks like measurement is actually comparison across unequal categories. It’s the academic equivalent of ranking a swimmer and a cyclist by the same stopwatch and concluding the swimmer is slow.

And yet the slide goes up. The numbers sit there. And everyone in the room absorbs the implicit verdict: we are not producing enough, fast enough, visibly enough. My colleagues in quantitative science publish more frequently than I do. They don’t work harder. It’s because their methods, journals, and review cycles make that possible. I write in the social sciences with mixed methods. My papers take longer to design, longer to analyze, longer to place. The journals I publish in have lower citation counts by the nature of the field. None of this appears on the slide.

This is institutional rejection: not a letter, not a formal decision, but a metric applied without context that renders your work invisible or insufficient by definition. It comes from an administrator who inherited a measurement system and is now accountable to it, who may not have the disciplinary fluency to question it, and who is passing the pressure down because that is how institutional pressure moves. It is rarely malicious. It is consistently damaging.

The department head who compares you equally to colleagues in different fields is not your enemy. They are operating inside a system that handed them the wrong tools and told them to measure anyway.

Rejection is by design

I want to tell you something I’ve seen from the inside.

As a peer reviewer, I read other reviewers’ comments before I submit my own. Not always (it depends on the journal’s process), but often enough to have developed an uncomfortable recognition of a pattern. When a paper is written by a researcher whose first language is not English, there is a subset of reviewers who cannot see past the syntax. The argument might be original. The methodology might be rigorous. The findings might be genuinely significant. And the review will spend three paragraphs on sentence structure.

I have read comments that recommended rejection on the basis of language alone. I have read comments that framed grammatical irregularities as evidence of unclear thinking — as though the two are the same thing, as though every idea that has ever moved a field forward arrived in perfect, polished sentences. I have read comments that were, if I am honest, closer to impatience than evaluation. Anonymous reviewers can express a special kind of cruelty.

I’ve seen enough to know that this is not a rogue reviewer problem; it is a system problem.

Check out: Bias in Academic Publishing Part I & Part II

The academic publishing infrastructure was built in and for a specific linguistic and geographic context. The majority of high-impact journals publish in English. The majority of editorial boards are based in North America and Western Europe. The peer review system is anonymous, which means bias has no accountability (and no human face). A reviewer who cannot distinguish between a language barrier and an intellectual one will never be corrected, will never know they caused harm, will never see the researcher on the other side of their comments trying to decide whether to revise or abandon or simply stop submitting altogether.

The metrics compound it. Impact factors, citation counts, h-indices — these were developed in and for specific disciplines and specific publishing cultures and have been applied universally as though context is irrelevant. Researchers outside elite institutions, outside the Global North, outside English as a first language, are measured by instruments that were never calibrated for this context. The carousel was built a long time ago. Most of us just got on it without being told what it was.

And then there is the scaffolding of time and money. A subscription-based journal with an established reputation can take eighteen months from submission to publication. An open access journal with fees waived can turn the same process around in six weeks. The research is the same. The rigor is the same. What’s different is who built the infrastructure and who it was built for.

Nobody designed this to harm any specific person. It just produces harm systematically, at scale, without accountability, and with extraordinary consistency. The anger has nowhere to go because there is no face. That is its own particular cruelty.

Having witnessed it, I name it here without hesitation.

Rejection is information

So after my embarrassing third rejection, at the prompting of that kind editor, I bought Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. I sat down with my paper and started working through it. And then, something happened.

I realized I had been performing academic writing.

I knew the jargon. I knew how to sound like a researcher. I knew how to organize a report of what I had done: the background, the methods, the findings, the discussion. I thought a journal paper was just a container for a project. You do the research, then you put it in the paper.

But here’s the thing: that is not what a journal paper is.

A journal paper is one idea. One singular contribution, large or small, offered to a conversation already in progress. The question isn’t what did I find? The question is: What am I adding, and to whom, and why does it matter now?

I had been writing from me. What I did, what I found, what I wanted to say. The paper I thought I’d written was actually a report of my research. It was well-organized, thorough, but pointed at no one in particular. I had no core argument.

Think of it this way: IMRAD is the rungs. The core argument is the ladder. Without it, the rungs simply collapse.

When I stopped and asked: What is this paper actually about? What is the so what? What is my argument? Everything shifted.

It became obvious what belonged in the paper. It became obvious what was tangential. The argument was implicit. I had to make it explicit.

I rewrote the paper. Not revised; rewrote. And it became two papers. Because once I articulated the argument, I could see that I had two distinct ideas. Two submissions. Two acceptances. Two lines on the CV.

That paper I’d been rejecting myself, by submitting it in the wrong form to the wrong journals, ended up doing more work than I’d originally imagined.

Since then, I have not received a single rejection for structure, organization, or lack of a clear argument. Reviewers still push back on my work: on my sample size, my definitions, my statistical interpretations. That’s the real conversation. That’s where the intellectual work happens. But the basic structural problems? Gone. Because when I sit down to write now, I know what I’m doing and why.

Not every rejection has a useful indicator. A desk rejection from a mismatched journal tells you almost nothing about your work. But the pattern, over time, becomes legible. The question shifts from what does this say about me to what does this tell me about my next step.

The researchers who publish prolifically are not the ones who avoid rejection. They’re the ones who learned to read it.

Close

The carousel doesn’t stop. You get off and on. Sometimes the same horse, sometimes a new one. And you realize, at some point, that almost everyone around you is riding too — even if they’re not waving in recognition.

At least, while we are on the ride, we can have music playing in the background.

What does rejection look like for you? Name it in the Publish It! community (not a member? Join free here) or drop it in the comments. The more we say it out loud, the less it runs the show.