The “Big Picture” of Grant and Manuscript Rejection

Finding Success Through Failure

The “Big Picture” of Grant and Manuscript Rejection

Robert Leeman, PhD

University of Florida

Rejection is difficult, so if you have trouble dealing with it, that means you are human. A wise person once told me to put all reviews away for at least 24 hours before considering them in detail. I have followed this advice and tend to wait over 24 hours.  I also do this for manuscripts given a revise and resubmit decision. I usually take at least a couple of days just to enjoy getting a positive result.

I taught a writing course in which we address responding to reviews. When I discuss this, I speak of my “angry young man” phase when I used to react to almost every reviewer comment with “how did they not understand that?” But over time, I came to understand that it is my job to make my manuscripts optimally clear, not the reviewers’. While reviewers do occasionally miss or misunderstand a point they should have grasped, far more often than not, reviewers misunderstand things because we have not made them clear. Once I came to understand this, I started to view manuscript reviews as constructive criticism that improves our work (though not always, I am human too).

We are taught early on that the person reviewing our manuscripts or grants is likely to be overworked and reading our document late at night and to write accordingly. Earlier in my career, I understood this on an intellectual level only. Now that I am a mid-career faculty member who reviews manuscripts and grants as an “extra” task on top of my demanding day job, I understand first-hand why clarity is essential.

Another thing to remember is that if you NEVER experience rejection, you are extremely brilliant, working at the absolute top of your field, or (much more likely) you are not challenging yourself sufficiently with your journal outlet choices. Unless I am writing up data that I know are limited in scope (e.g., cross-sectional data or primarily null findings--yes I publish those though that is a topic for another day!), I send manuscripts first to a journal that would be a peak outlet for that paper, considering multiple factors. If it works out, great, I am on track to publish in a higher-impact journal. If it does not, I have useful feedback that I can use to improve my manuscript for submission elsewhere. The silver lining is that when sending your paper to a new journal, you control what reviewer feedback to take or ignore, as opposed to a revise and resubmit when you have to at least address every comment. The second time around, I typically send the paper to a journal where I have strong confidence that it will be accepted. There are too many other papers, grants and other tasks to work on to spend the time necessary to send a paper to a third journal, thus I try to avoid that if possible.  

In summary, dealing with rejection is hard, but getting a sense of where this experience falls in “the big picture” will help you to deal with it at least a bit better and most importantly, lead to better manuscripts and grants in the future.

For this next issue, we want to hear about a time when you worked with a challenging patient/client.  What is your process for managing this experience, what did you learn from the experience, and what would you recommend to others who are working with a challenging patient/client? Please limit responses to 500 words and send to dana.litt@unthsc.edu by October 1, 2019.