How Should An Academic Handle Paper Rejections?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.360 | All right, let's do one more question about deep work.

00:00:08.280 | This one, appropriately enough, comes from Deep Academic.

00:00:14.200 | I think if your parents named you that,

00:00:16.160 | it would be a shame if you became like a YouTube

00:00:20.440 | influencer.

00:00:21.120 | So I guess you didn't have any options

00:00:22.560 | about what your job was going to be once your parents named you

00:00:25.180 | Deep Academic.

00:00:26.960 | Here's a question, how do you handle paper rejection

00:00:30.080 | as an academic?

00:00:32.040 | How do you help your students get over it?

00:00:34.800 | Yeah, it's a good question.

00:00:35.960 | I struggle with it.

00:00:37.480 | Non-academics don't realize this.

00:00:40.480 | They don't realize how incredibly competitive

00:00:46.000 | academia is, especially sort of tenure track R1 research

00:00:49.240 | institutions.

00:00:49.920 | There's these venues in which you

00:00:51.680 | can publish your papers that are very stratified.

00:00:54.680 | And it is incredibly hard to get your papers published

00:00:57.560 | in the good venues.

00:00:58.800 | It's very competitive.

00:00:59.800 | Most things get rejected.

00:01:00.960 | So you're constantly in this competition.

00:01:03.040 | I think the public sometimes has this view of academia

00:01:06.080 | where A, they call it teaching, which, again,

00:01:12.120 | research-oriented academics, it is a source of frustration

00:01:15.900 | that their job is described as teaching.

00:01:19.080 | It's like if you're a professional basketball player

00:01:23.280 | and people were like, oh, yeah, you do leg pressing.

00:01:28.680 | And you're like, well, yeah, I do leg pressing in the gym

00:01:31.160 | as part of my training for being a really good basketball

00:01:33.720 | player, which is incredibly competitive and hard.

00:01:35.840 | The hardest thing in academia is trying

00:01:37.720 | to publish in these competitive venues.

00:01:39.160 | It's intellectual warfare, the very smartest people

00:01:41.280 | in the world fighting for a small number of slots.

00:01:44.680 | 10% to 15% of what is submitted is going to get accepted.

00:01:47.440 | It's very difficult. So you get a lot of rejections.

00:01:50.200 | And it's competitive and it's difficult.

00:01:54.360 | I struggle with this.

00:01:55.440 | I've gone through different phases in my career.

00:01:58.560 | So when I was a graduate student,

00:02:00.160 | my pace of publication would be much less, maybe one or two

00:02:03.280 | papers a year when I first got going.

00:02:05.520 | And it would hit me hard when a paper would get rejected

00:02:08.760 | because it's all I had worked on for a few months.

00:02:10.960 | And I have notes in my Moleskines I can go find

00:02:15.240 | of me reacting to rejections.

00:02:17.120 | I took them hard.

00:02:18.920 | But then as I hit my stride as a junior faculty member,

00:02:24.320 | the wheel started to click.

00:02:25.520 | And I published a lot.

00:02:28.240 | And I really got a lot of stuff accepted.

00:02:30.560 | So it was a nice golden period where I published a ton

00:02:32.520 | of papers, got tenure early, distinguished professorship.

00:02:35.640 | Things were really rolling well.

00:02:36.960 | I was publishing four or five papers a month.

00:02:40.040 | And then I, more recently--

00:02:41.440 | I've talked about this on the show-- the pandemic

00:02:44.160 | knocked me back to the world of not submitting as much,

00:02:48.600 | but way more rejections for the small number of things

00:02:51.320 | I was submitting.

00:02:52.120 | So I'm back into that world of rejection.

00:02:55.400 | Briefly, what happened there for people who are non-academics,

00:02:58.040 | again, because it's so competitive,

00:03:00.440 | there is an incredibly high quality threshold.

00:03:03.760 | And so what happened to me during the pandemic

00:03:06.440 | is two things happened.

00:03:07.360 | One, I got knocked out of my collaboration cycles

00:03:09.520 | because I have collaborators around the world

00:03:11.360 | and we meet in person twice a year.

00:03:13.800 | And they're top-notch collaborators.

00:03:15.640 | I've known most of them since I was 22 years old at MIT.

00:03:19.600 | And they're all over the world, but we meet twice a year.

00:03:22.840 | Usually, there's a time in the summer for whatever.

00:03:26.400 | There's a conference we all go to.

00:03:27.840 | And one of my close collaborators,

00:03:30.440 | longtime collaborators, comes back to DC every summer

00:03:33.400 | as family's here.

00:03:34.080 | And we bring in other collaborators

00:03:35.520 | and we all get together.

00:03:36.520 | And that's where most of the ideas

00:03:38.160 | were generated that we then write papers on.

00:03:41.440 | Turns out, if you don't have those meetings,

00:03:43.960 | as happened during the pandemic, you

00:03:45.440 | don't have the good ideas to work on.

00:03:47.960 | And two, I just didn't have the time.

00:03:49.480 | I just had-- it was the typical impacts a lot of people had,

00:03:53.320 | especially people with kids.

00:03:54.480 | With the pandemic, I didn't have as much time

00:03:56.320 | to spend on research.

00:03:57.160 | So I went to about 50% effort.

00:04:02.480 | The issue is in competitive academia,

00:04:05.120 | 50% effort doesn't mean, oh, you publish 50% less papers.

00:04:09.280 | It means any paper you write, the quality

00:04:12.360 | falls just enough that they're all below the acceptance

00:04:15.200 | threshold.

00:04:17.040 | And so I did that for a year.

00:04:18.960 | I basically didn't publish anything.

00:04:20.520 | And then I realized, oh, I should probably just

00:04:22.480 | put all of my energy into less papers.

00:04:24.160 | And last year, I published a very nice paper

00:04:26.840 | where I put my energy just--

00:04:28.600 | if I can't have as much time to spend on this,

00:04:30.800 | let me put all the time into one paper

00:04:32.040 | because I can't fall below it.

00:04:33.080 | But anyways, I've been really struggling with it.

00:04:34.840 | It's the lowest publication year last year.

00:04:36.680 | It was the lowest publication year

00:04:38.320 | I've ever had as a professional academic because

00:04:41.320 | of the pandemic.

00:04:42.480 | I still struggle with it, the academic.

00:04:44.320 | I think it's hard.

00:04:46.520 | The best thing you can do is tune up your process.

00:04:52.480 | So after some hard rejections, tune up the process.

00:04:55.960 | What's missing here?

00:04:57.520 | What do I need to do?

00:04:59.280 | What would I need to do to not get rejected as often?

00:05:03.880 | Do I need better collaboration, more work, more whatever it is?

00:05:07.600 | Figure out how do I tune up my process.

00:05:09.280 | And by the way, you can decide, I don't want to do that.

00:05:11.200 | I don't have time to do that.

00:05:12.200 | That's not where I am in my career.

00:05:13.200 | But be clear about it.

00:05:14.080 | And then two, do the real work.

00:05:15.520 | So there's no shortcuts around it.

00:05:18.400 | You probably just have to do the stuff that's hard.

00:05:20.880 | Read the papers, understand what's going on,

00:05:23.000 | push your ideas farther than you think they need to be pushed.

00:05:26.600 | Do the work that's required.

00:05:27.600 | Tune up your process.

00:05:28.480 | It's the best you can do.

00:05:30.400 | And then keep in mind there's some stochasticity too.

00:05:32.680 | There is going to be some luck.

00:05:33.960 | And that should even itself out.

00:05:36.200 | But anyways, I'm with you.

00:05:38.040 | I came off a five-year period of hot shot publishing

00:05:41.160 | down to nothing.

00:05:43.040 | And now I'm crawling back out of that,

00:05:47.400 | but carefully because I don't know

00:05:49.280 | that I want to go back to hot shot computer science

00:05:52.400 | publishing.

00:05:52.920 | There's so much other interesting stuff

00:05:54.360 | happening in the world now, especially

00:05:55.600 | my involvement in digital ethics and some of the public-facing

00:05:57.960 | writing I'm doing.

00:05:58.740 | So I'm rebuilding my life from scratch academically.

00:06:02.360 | Then we'll have more publications than I just had,

00:06:04.480 | but maybe not as much as I used to.

00:06:06.840 | It's hard.

00:06:07.760 | I feel your pain.

00:06:09.240 | Tune process, do real work, recognize there's luck.

00:06:12.280 | And otherwise, try not to obsess too much about it

00:06:15.600 | because, man, paper rejections is tough.

00:06:18.800 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:06:22.140 | (upbeat music)

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How Should An Academic Handle Paper Rejections?

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