I’ve been working in academia for about 5 years and been submitting a lot of papers. I noticed that it’s too random. A good quality work doesn’t necessarily and deterministically get the paper accepted and vice versa.
Let’s say that the chance of your paper acceptance is p and you sumbit it n times. The number of papers accepted will follow a Binomial distribution. The thing is that p is not really up to you. There are too many unobservable factors, e.g., reviewers assigned, that are beyond your control. So your best bet is to have n as high as possible to increase the expectation of the total number of accepted papers.
So what is this, really? I feel like a blindfolded football player just taking as many shots on goal as possible, hoping that a few somehow make it in.
Comments
p is at least partially upto you.
I mean, one big thing is that journals can only publish so many articles in any given issues, which by necessity means perfectly good articles never get published.
No.
Yes, publication and TT hiring are both really messed up lotteries. You can influence the number of tickets, somewhat.
Thing is, I think the part of p that is up to you probably decreases as you increase n (per unit time). Field-dependent, of course.
That’s not my experience. You can maximize your p. Further, you may want to evaluate what is ‘good quality’. Many researchers think whatever ideas they managed to write down is good. It’s bit like selling. If you sale ice in hot countries, your p is much lower. If you want to sell it to Inuit, your p better be super high.
This is true of approximately every aspect of life. You roll the dice and see what happens.
The only solace is if you actually care about the stuff you publish (so how many submissions it takes doesn’t matter too much), as opposed to caring too much about getting accepted all the time.
In my field, something has to be really bad to not be published in one of our main (uniformly good) journals. In my experience, what the papers that get rejected are most likely to have in common is poor supervision of a student lead author. So your premise doesn’t hold for all fields.