My research paper was rejected to be published. What can I do?

Prof. Artal. I am postdoctoral researcher working in Physics in an east-European country. I published several articles in high impact journals during my PhD thesis. However, the first article I submitted from my new research was rejected by the editor of the journal. I am quite disappointed since I believe the research was good (in fact the best I ever did) and moreover, the reasons for the rejection were not convincing. I feel very depressed and even thinking quitting my research career. If anything I can do? Alexander, Kiev, Ukraine.

Research papers, together with conference presentations, are the major outputs in the research activities. After a lot of work, efforts and dedication a paper is typically submitted to a journal to be published. No research is actually completed until is not published and is accessible to the whole scientific community. In addition, careers, grants, reputation and promotions severely depend in the number and quality of the publications… so if a paper is rejected, this is typically a bad thing! and everybody, as Alexander, can feel really miserable.

Perhaps Alexander could be relieved to know that every scientist had some rejected papers in his career… so, first of all, this is not the end, but actually something quite normal. You can be even more relieved to know that there are well-known and important discoverings that were initially rejected! So, concerning your question, my first advice and recommendation: please RELAX! This will not be the end of your career and this is a normal situation.

I think I am in a good position to address Alexander’s question. First, I am a scientist with a long experience dealing with editors and reviewers with my own work. On the other hand, I serve as editor for two international journals, so I have to deal with other scientists and yes... in some occasions I have to reject their papers!

You need to recognize honestly the importance of your research, if everything is correct and clear, the degree of novelty, etc… This is something you need to learn from your mentors and do not be shy to ask your colleagues. In many cases reviewers and editors are right and perhaps you overestimated your own research. If this is the case ask for advice and recognize the situation. Plan more experiments, rewrite the paper or add a new model to complete the paper.

In most high quality journals, you will receive at least to reviews and most likely you will be asked to revise the manuscript. It is also common in some journals to have a direct rejection based in the large number of manuscript they receive. This argument is quite subjective and difficult to change, so if this is the case of your rejected paper, perhaps the best option is simply to resubmit it to another journal.

Other situation (and probably what actually happened to you) is to have reviews criticizing the manuscript in a way you believe is biased and non correct. If a rejection is made based in these reviews, you should write the editor an appeal letter demonstrating point by point every detail you think was not correct. If you are right, the editor should reconsider the decision and eventually your paper perhaps is sent to different reviewers.

It is true, however that in some cases the communication with journals may be quite frustrating for the authors. I can share with you a recent (and bad!!) experience I had. We prepared a manuscript in a topic I believe was quite novel and providing interesting results with potential applications. The paper was sent to one of the top journals in Ophthalmology. We were asked to revise the manuscript in three occasions with very detailed description of every minor change and long arguments. We also reduced the length of the paper and several figures were modified. In the re-submission to the journal number four and after a year and a half… I received a letter from the editor telling me that the paper was rejected because the priority of the paper was low for the journal! You can imagine my reaction… I feel as bad as you may be now. If that was the case, why they asked me to revise the paper for three consecutive times… This is in my opinion an example of a bad editorial behavior. A rejection should be done when based in subjective criteria (such as space or priority) as soon as possible.

Of course, it may happen that a paper is rejected after a revision if the authors are not able to answer the reviewer’s comments. One typical mistake from some authors is to perform very minor (or simply none) revisions ignoring some important comments from the reviewers. You always should take very seriously any revision (at the same level of dedication or even more than in the initial preparation of the paper). Prepare a letter where every change and every argument is clearly listed. You do not need to do any suggested changes, but you need to address every comment, in that case stating the reason you are not acting on a particular suggestion. In most cases papers are greatly improved by the revision process, so take advantage of that.

What can be even most frustrating is when rejections are based clearly in non-scientific (political?) reasons. Several years ago, in a study performed during one of my former students PhD thesis (Antonio Guirao), we measured for the first time the change with age of the aberrations of the cornea. We showed that corneal aberrations increase slightly with age, quite differently as in the whole eye and the lens that exhibit a more significant change with age (See picture where blue symbols represents the amount of corneal aberrations and pink symbols the aberrations for the whole eye). At the time, this was an important result to understand the optics of the aging human eye and was reported first in a conference. Other group followed our idea very quickly, replicated the study independently and submitted a paper before that we did. A few months later, our own paper was rejected because the journal already had a similar paper on the topic. We had the idea of this study first; we did the experiment first, but we had problems to get this published. This happens sometime, and you can feel bad (especially students will feel very, very bad).

In any case, our study was finally published in other excellent journal and is widely used and cited since then (http://lo.um.es/publications/PDFs_main/josa_cornea_age_oct00.pdf)

So, you never should be too nervous or too anxious concerning papers. In particular, try to be calm when addressing reviewers and editors. Be firm, but not too aggressive. The research will be finally published, but if not... I can tell you that every scientist have some pieces of research unpublished... 

… and an affordable, typical and good Murcian tavern.
I received several comments on a previous post where I reported here on a couple of good, but expensive, restaurants... My correspondents asked about more affordable options. And here you have one. It is a “classic” tavern in the center of Murcia city. It is usually rather busy but the service is efficient and the tapas selection quite good and inexpensive. It was refurbished recently so the atmosphere is not as traditional as in the past, but if you are in Murcia you should visit!
Many of the visitors of my lab were there often. The name of the place is “Los Toneles” and you can find it in near the hotel "Rincon de Pepe" (Calle Canovas del Castillo, 7, Murcia) and a short walk from the Murcia cathedral (http://www.murciaciudad.com/ingles/catedral.htm)
Dan Green, now a retired professor from the University of Michigan (a great vision scientist and a good friend) use to be there nearly every day during his visits to my lab in mid 90’s. In the picture below you can see Dan with some of my former students (Ignacio Iglesias, Juanma Bueno, Fernando Vargas) and me at Los Toneles tavern around 1995.

 A. Guirao, M. Redondo, P. Artal (2000). Optical aberrations of the human cornea as a function of age J. Opt. Soc. Am. A, (17)