Why is it so difficult to determine whether a journal editor has accepted or rejected your article?
“So is this letter a rejection or what?” I hear such questions surprisingly often from the participants in a course I teach on “Writing and Publishing the Journal Article.” You wouldn’t think that one of the hurdles to getting published in peer-reviewed journals is properly interpreting the decision letter, but it can be difficult to determine just what the editor is telling you.
Sometimes that’s because of the editors’ poor wording or inexperience, but most often, it’s because of their desire not to be devastating. Neither side is aided by the lack of standard language or an agreed-upon formula for delivering the verdict. So over the years, I’ve come up with a process to aid academics in parsing the decision letters.
Delay reading it. The temptation when you receive a decision letter or an e-mail message is to open it right away. If you must, you must, but don’t trust your instincts on that first reading.
The friend of a student of mine renders a cautionary tale: Upon receiving an editor’s letter, she opened it with trepidation. The first paragraph included the sentence: “The reviewers’ reports are in and both agree that your article is severely marred by poor writing.” Upset, she flung the letter aside and spent an hour in bed ruing her decision to enter academe. When her partner got home, he picked up the letter and entered the bedroom saying, “Congratulations, honey! Why didn’t you call and tell me your article got accepted?” Upon actually reading the letter, she found that the editors had accepted the article pending major revisions, with the kind editor offering to work with her on the writing.
Emotional reactions that forestall understanding are common if you do not save the letter for a time when you can emotionally absorb its contents.
Placate the amygdala. Before reading the letter and the attached readers’ reports, take a deep breath and remind yourself that all reviews are subjective and that academic reviewers do not see their purpose as affirming your brilliance but as assessing your shortcomings.
Studies have shown that peer reviewers always have more negative comments than positive comments. Further, one study found that more than 40 percent of peer reviews had comments indicating bias and prejudice, and other studies showed that agreement between reviewers of the same article ranges from a low of 40 percent to only as high as 70 percent. At the same time, however, studies have repeatedly shown that peer review improved the quality of articles. Maybe that’s why, according to yet another study, the lengthier the peer reviewers’ comments, the more likely the article is to be cited in the future.
Whatever its faults, the peer-review process has a proven record of enabling authors to produce stronger articles.
Categorize the decision. Editors’ decision letters fall into one of six varieties.
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Pure accept. This almost never happens. In my 11 years as a managing editor of a peer-reviewed journal, we never once accepted an article “as is.” Likewise, Jodi Holschuh, an associate professor at the University of Georgia and an editor with the Journal of Literacy Research, said, “For the more than 250 manuscripts received while I have been assisting with the journal, not one first draft has been accepted unconditionally, and very few have been conditionally accepted pending minor revisions.” Many academics, nonetheless, seem to think journals are in the business of accepting initial submissions. That’s just not how journals work. The best-case scenario is that you will receive one of the following two types of decisions.
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Revise minor problems and resubmit. Articles in this category have been conditionally accepted, pending minor revisions specified by the reviewers in their attached reports. Unfortunately, some journal editors do not always make clear to authors that the article has been accepted. They may simply ask you to make the revisions and resubmit it. Some signs that the article has been conditionally accepted: The editor urges you to resubmit the article by a certain date or suggests that, if you return the revision by a certain date, the article will appear in a particular issue. Another sign is when the editor recommends only minor changes, such as rewriting the abstract, expanding the methodology section, adding a few references, developing the conclusion, or defining some terms.
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Revise major problems and resubmit. Articles in this category have been conditionally accepted, pending the author’s completion of major revisions specified by the reviewers in their attached reports. This type of decision is the most difficult to detect since editors often won’t use the word “accept” anywhere in the letter but will, instead, make confusingly discouraging or encouraging remarks.
To further complicate matters, some editors will suggest that revisions are major when, in fact, they are minor, or that they are minor when they are major. Make your own decision about how difficult and substantive the changes must be.
Here is an example of the type of language an editor might use:
“Enclosed please find the reviewers’ reports on your essay. One reviewer has minor recommendations for revision, the other has fairly substantial recommendations. Although their reports are very positive about your essay, they also include helpful suggestions for improving the essay, especially regarding [some revisable element, such as the related literature]. Given the reviewers’ concerns, I cannot accept the essay in its present form. I can offer, however, to send a revised version of the essay back to the second reviewer, should you wish to rework your argument substantially in line with these reports and resubmit the essay.”
The difference between the two types of acceptances above and this decision can be extremely difficult to detect. It may even be delivered in the exact same language as cited above. Search for the key words in the editor’s letter such as “not publishable in its current form” or “not yet ready.” The modifiers “current” and “yet” suggest that the editors might welcome the essay in another form.
Or maybe they don’t have the heart to say that they have rejected your article, so this is their attempt to be encouraging. At my journal, I know we were sometimes surprised to see an article resubmitted that we thought we had rejected, but when we reread our decision letter we could see how the (hopeful) author might have read into it more than we intended. An editor must tread a fine line between clarity and cruelty.
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Rejected and dismissed. This is an absolute rejection, with reviewers’ reports attached to back up the editors’ claim that the article “is not publishable” or “is not ready for publication” or “cannot be published at this time” or “does not meet our standards for publication” or “is not right for us.”
No one will directly say “we have rejected your article” or “please don’t resubmit this article,” which causes confusion for the recipients of such letters, especially if they are not native speakers of English.
Can the editors be rejecting the article if their letter is encouraging and includes suggestions for improving the article? Yes.
Although the editors may include some positive language (e.g., “the reviewers appreciated your line of thought”) and may even seem to suggest that you continue working on the essay (e.g., “we hope that you will find the reviewers’ reports helpful as you continue to work on these interesting ideas”), it is not a revise-and-resubmit notice unless it specifically mentions resubmission.
If you can’t tell whether your article has been rejected or not, it is always acceptable to e-mail the editor and ask: “Thank you for sending me your decision on my article. I just wanted to make sure that I understand it properly: Are you requesting that I revise and resubmit this essay, or do you not expect to see it again?”
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Rejected by editor. This is an absolute rejection without any reviewers’ reports attached. The lack of reports is one of the clearest signs of rejection, as is the appearance anywhere in the decision letter of the phrase “best of luck!” That phrase is a code I have found in many editors’ letters — it almost always appears in rejection letters somewhere. It is meant to sound cheery and encouraging, but usually means “Push off, you’re going to need luck to get this published anywhere!”
Set the letter aside. Before you make any decision about proceeding, sleep on it. Editorial recommendations that at first seem heartbreaking can seem reasonable and doable the next day or the next week.
Wendy Belcher is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and author of Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (Sage, 2009).