Rejection Resilience – Quantifying Faculty Experience with Submitting Papers Multiple Times after a Rejection

Background

Receiving a rejection letter after submitting a manuscript is common experience in academic medicine.^1–3 Yet, despite the fact that most journals reject far more papers than they accept, many faculty describe taking manuscript rejection as a personal failure associated with negative emotions including shame, disillusionment and isolation.⁴ For some, the feelings surrounding manuscript rejection can lead to decreased productivity, discouragement of producing further scholarly output, and even abandonment of academic careers.³ This powerful negative emotional experience may be rooted in the conceptual framework of acceptance from the field of psychology, which highlights our need as humans to feel accepted and validated by our peers.⁵

During discussions on rejection with faculty members, we often ask participants to raise their hand if they have had a manuscript rejected at least once before being accepted somewhere, and then keep it in the air if twice, three times, etc. This activity consistently yields two collective sighs of relief; first, when faculty see how common their peers and mentors have experienced rejection, and again when they note how many needed to demonstrate perseverance – what we call “rejection resilience” – to overcome multiple rejections to get a paper published. In this study, we wished to capture that experience empirically by determining how often our pediatric faculty have needed to demonstrate this resilience in navigating rejection, with a goal of further destigmatizing and normalizing the experience.

Approach/Innovation

Study Design

We developed an anonymous, voluntary, IRB-exempt, six-question pilot survey via REDCap that was sent to all academic clinical faculty in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota in December, 2020. The survey was developed internally and we opted for a simple survey design as a pilot to start the discussion about rejection. As the questions were purely based on recall (i.e. how many times have you given up on a paper) and did not involve any scales meriting analysis, we did not feel this survey design required validation or pilot testing beyond gathering initial feedback from peers about clarity of the verbiage. We asked participants to indicate the greatest number of times they had to submit a single paper to different journals before it was ultimately accepted. We also asked faculty how many papers (if any) they have given up on submitting elsewhere after receiving rejections, and if that had occurred, how many rejections they had received for each paper they gave up on. Finally, participants indicated rank and gender.

Data-Analysis

We summarized all continuous and categorical variables by mean (SD) and frequency (%), respectively. Variables were analyzed in an overall category and then further stratified by gender and academic rank. We used Fisher’s exact tests and linear regression to test differences in responses by gender and rank. All p-values are two-sided and considered at the 0.05 level for statistical significance. Analysis was completed in R (R Core Team, 2020; version 4.0.3.)

Results

Of 220 pediatric faculty, 122 (55%) completed the survey. Almost all faculty (96%) had received manuscript rejections necessitating submission to more than one journal. Nearly half of respondents (44%) had papers that required 4 or more submissions prior to acceptance (mean 3.7, SD 1.76). This was similar across academic rank. There was a wide range with some faculty submitting a manuscript 10 or more times prior to acceptance (See Figure). Most faculty (52%) reported giving up on at least one paper in their career with, an average of 2.0 (SD 1.3) rejections on the papers they abandoned.

Figure.

The top graph shows the most number of times faculty members submitted a manuscript prior to it being accepted (sorted by academic rank). The bottom graph shows the number of times faculty at different ranks have given up on resubmitting papers in their career.

Of the respondents, 48 (39%) were male and 74 (61%) were female which mirrors the breakdown of the department (32% F; 68% M). There was no statistically significant difference among gender in papers published, most times submitted before acceptance, papers given up on, or times submitted before giving up on a paper. Both associate professors and professors had resubmitted manuscripts after initial rejection more often than assistant professors (associates 0.87 more times [95% CI: (0.14, 1.59)] p=0.02; professors 1.17 more times [95% CI: (0.44, 1.89)], p<0.01. Additionally, professors had given up on papers after rejection 0.71 more times [95% CI: (0.15, 1.27)], p=0.01, on average, in comparison to assistant professors.

Discussion

Most studies on manuscript rejection aim to quantify how common it is, either by reporting on the fate of manuscripts that were rejected at one journal and then published elsewhere,⁶ or asking faculty to quantify their experience with rejection.¹ Others use qualitative methodology to capture the feelings surrounding the experience or having a paper rejected.^2–4 Our study is unique in that we aimed to not just capture the binary that rejection occurs, but looked to document the experience of rejection resilience by quantifying how much persistence was needed for certain papers to find a published home.

Manuscript rejection was common in our department with 80% of the faculty having to submit to three or more journals before one of their papers was accepted for publication. As expected, we found a significant association between rank and number of papers published as well as number of times they have given up on a paper. This likely reflects the fact that faculty at higher ranks have simply had more time to both build rejection resilience and recognize when a paper may not be worthy of publication, or have simply had a larger denominator of work, yet it remains that faculty at all ranks experienced rejection. At the same time, junior faculty were more likely to give up on papers sooner which may provide insight for an opportunity for mentorship in this arena.

Despite knowing how common manuscript rejection is within the academic community, rejection continues to carry a strong negative weight. It has long been shown that humans have an innate need to be accepted by their peers which likely explains why rejection triggers such negative emotions.⁵ Accordingly, those who develop rejection sensitivity, defined as one who anxiously awaits and expect rejections,⁷ have a greater association to develop depression, low self-worth and decreased academic performance.^8,9 By showing (and sharing) that manuscript rejection was the norm among faculty at our institution, we hope to debunk the myth that we are alone in our rejection and for scholars to feel accepted rather than isolated from their peers who also experience manuscript rejection.

Others have proposed models aimed to destigmatize rejection including sharing CVs of failures,¹⁰ or making one’s submissions, rejections, and acceptances visible to peers in realtime.¹¹ We also recommend mentors proactively discuss how to respond to possible editorial decisions, where one might submit next, and review helpful tools such as articles that detail how to respond to revisions in a systematic way.¹²

Our pilot study has limitations. We did not capture how academically productive each respondent had been in their career, nor did we explore other considerations including author order and the caliber of journal a manuscript was submitted to, and these are natural next steps for future studies on manuscript rejection. Additionally, as we aimed to collect minimal demographics to remove any potential for unmasking, we know little about the differences between respondents and nonrespondents. It is worth noting the breakdown of respondents by rank and gender mirrors the breakdown within our department. While our study was a single institution pilot and it remains to be seen if these numbers are consistent across a larger study population, we feel the key finding is relevant to all departments; it is the norm for faculty to experience manuscript rejection and often need to submit papers multiple times. By incorporating discussions of our own need to demonstrate rejection resilience with our peers and mentees, we can help normalize it which may reduce some of the stigma and negative emotions of isolation and shame associated with rejection.

What’s New:

Navigating manuscript rejection can be demoralizing and lonely. This study demonstrates how common manuscript rejection is among faculty of all academic ranks in hopes to normalize rejection and open conversations about rejection in mentorship.