Doing Economics

4.9 Dealing with Rejection
Anyone who is in the business of publishing peer-reviewed work—most
academics, and many scientists in government, industry, or at think tanks—
will sooner or later almost surely face rejection.
And hopefully, you will (or already have) too, because even though
getting rejected is never good news, it is a sign that you have been
productive and that you are ambitious and hopeful about the quality of your
work.
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 So first: if you are planning on doing research in economics for a
career, you will get rejected. You will get rejected a lot. In many cases, you
will disagree with the reasons why you were rejected, at least initially,
before you have had time to think carefully about the reviewers’ or the
editor’s comments. In some cases, the reason why you are rejected will be
nebulous (“We receive more manuscripts than we can publish”). Rarely if
ever will a rejection be for personal reasons. Thus, the first thing to
understand is that a rejection says nothing about you, and it most likely says
nothing about your overall ability to do or write about research. All that it
says is that this paper—more accurately, this version of this paper—was
deemed as either not a good fit for or not up to the quality level of the
journal you submitted it to.
One particular quote which I have found to accurately describe how I felt
in my first few years as an assistant professor is the following quote from
Ira Glass, probably the most successful public media personality of this
generation:
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good
taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff,
it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s
not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.
And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people

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never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do
interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our
work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go
through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this
phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can
do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week
you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work
that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your
ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone
I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while.
You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Glass is the host and producer of This American Life, a radio show that
tends to have little if anything to do with frontier research in economics, but
as researchers, we are engaged in creative work, especially when we decide
which research question to spend our time on and when we write up our
research results. For every additional year I am fortunate to spend in this
profession, I find the above quote more and more accurate, both because of
my own experience and because it finds echoes in the experience of all of
the early-career researchers I know.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for an assistant professor to have no
publications (or no new ones since starting on the tenure track) at the end of
their third year, but for them to publish anywhere from five to ten articles in
their fourth, fifth, and sixth year on the job.
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 Knowing that, it is important
not to let those first few years—those difficult few years during which there
is a gap between your taste and the quality of your work—get you down.
And there will likely be times where you will want to give up and look for
one of those well-paying private-sector jobs where there is little to none of
that publish-or-perish nonsense.
For most people, getting rejected does not get better with time, with
tenure, or with successive promotions. Linearly interpolating from that, I
suspect getting rejected also does not get better if and when you are named
fellow of your professional association. For this reason, it is best to develop
a thick skin, and learn to take rejection in stride.

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