Researchers face rejection similar to actors and writers. When scientists submit their work to journals, many manuscripts are rejected from their top-choice publications but eventually get accepted elsewhere. A significant number of submissions never find a home.
A recent study highlights the process of rejection and resubmission, suggesting it can be influenced by the differing attitudes and behaviors of researchers globally.
Following the fate of approximately 126,000 rejected manuscripts, the study found that authors in Western countries are almost 6% more likely to successfully publish a paper after rejection compared to those in other regions. This discrepancy may be due to differences in access to procedural knowledge, which includes understanding how to interpret negative reviews, revise accordingly, and resubmit to a suitable journal. Many academic journals are based in Western countries.
“Maybe it’s something about being in the right networks and being able to get the right kind of advice at the right time,” says co-author Misha Teplitskiy, a sociologist studying innovation in science and technology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Rejection Review
Teplitskiy and his colleagues analyzed data provided by IOP Publishing (IOPP), a UK-based company publishing over 90 English-language journals. They examined around 203,000 manuscripts submitted to 62 IOPP physical-sciences journals between 2018 and 2022, of which 62% were rejected. The researchers used a bibliometric database to track whether similar work was published elsewhere and sorted these publications by the geographical region of the corresponding author.
The analysis, published as a preprint on the SSRN server, showed that corresponding authors from Western countries are 5.7% more likely to publish a manuscript after rejection compared to those from other regions. They achieved this 23 days faster on average and revised their abstracts 5.9% less often, ultimately publishing in journals with 0.8% higher impact factors.
In a breakdown by country, the study revealed that around 70% of papers from Asian countries like China and India were eventually published, compared to 85% from the United States and nearly 90% from many European countries.
Teplitskiy suggests that the tacit norms and rules of the publishing process are more widely circulated in the West, contributing to a higher likelihood of successful responses to rejections. However, the team received few responses to a follow-up survey asking authors of rejected papers about this hypothesis.
“People hate surveys in general, but they really don’t like surveys about their rejected papers,” Teplitskiy notes.
