You've poured so many of your precious work and personal hours into perfecting an article. You finally click "Submit" and feel so relieved. And then, after perhaps months or—let's face it, maybe years—you receive a cold rejection email. Or worse, the journal ghosts you completely. This is a really hard but unfortunately very common occurrence in academic publishing. Why is it so hard to get your article published when you're putting in all the work you should be?

Let me start by saying: This is not your fault and it doesn't mean your research is not publishable. There's of course many reasons why you're finding it difficult to get your article out into the world. A lot of these reasons have to do with the fact that academic publishing largely relies on an unsustainable model of free or unpaid labor and academics only have so much time and bandwidth for unremunerated service. Having said this, from the perspective of a former Managing Editor of an R1 research journal who used to evaluate articles everyday, you're not getting published or it's taking a very long time for you to get published because of the same recurring problems. And, you absolutely have the power to fix some of these problems, unsustainable publishing model aside.

Here, I want to demystify the publishing process a bit—from initial submission, through double-blind peer-review, and finally publication—in terms of what typically goes wrong along the pipeline and what you can do to prevent it.

1) You haven't formatted your article properly according to the journal guidelines

This may not seem like a big deal, but guidelines are guidelines for a reason. When editors are having to individually evaluate a stack of lengthy submissions, we want to focus on the most important things—the strength of your argument and how this article enriches the field it is contributing to. If we are immediately bombarded with all of the things wrong with the article before we've even begun reading, you're putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. If the journal has asked you to submit in the latest version of MLA and you submit in Chicago or vice versa, you're immediately creating work for the journal staff. And more than that, you're suggesting to us that you can't follow instructions and don't respect the time it takes us to help you bring your article into the world. I don't know if you've ever converted an article from one citation style to another; I have, and let me assure you, it is a lot of work.

Ideally, when we receive your submission, we should have everything we need to proceed with the peer-review process. If we have to contact you with a list of the things you need to change before we can do anything, the hard cold truth is that you're setting yourself up for either a long delay or being ghosted altogether.

2) This article is great—but why have you sent it to us?

Most journal submission platforms allow you to write a brief note to the editor situating the article and allowing you to explain why you believe your article is a good fit for the journal. Don't miss this step. If we say we're a humanities and social sciences journal publishing research on Latin America and you send us an article on the Cuban mangroves' susceptibility to damage because of high intensity hurricanes, we're probably going to wonder why we're receiving this instead of an environmental sciences journal. As part of Latin America, of course we publish articles on Cuba, but we won't have peer-reviewers on hand with the expertise to be able to critically evaluate the science of your argument. Of course, there is a very obvious conflict of interest in this example, but the point is salient nonetheless. Don't make us scratch our heads as to whether this article fits within the scope of our journal. Do your research about us and show us it makes sense for your article to be published with us.

N.B. what if my article is super interdisciplinary or doesn't neatly into an established field? That's okay! There's actually journals that specialize in the different and difficult to define. For example: SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, hosted by the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, writes

"We are especially interested in staging conversations that model promiscuously transdisciplinary modes of inquiry and presentation. Against camps. Steeped in expertise and particularity. Authorized by the depth and seriousness of study and engagement."

3) Your niche is too niche

This may seem counterintuitive given that academics are continuously told their work must be original, innovative, and new—but I think this advice is often misleading. Rather than imagining yourself as doing something entirely unprecedented and going where no scholar has gone before, it can be more productive to think of your work as meaningfully building on existing scholarship, with a few thoughtful pivots along the way.

When a submission is so niche that its intellectual interlocutors are unclear, it creates practical problems for the journal. We may struggle to (a) identify appropriate peer reviewers, and (b) find scholars who are willing to take on the labor of reviewing a piece that feels too far outside their expertise. Even if your work is excellent, making it legible within an existing conversation is essential to moving it through the review process.

4) Your structure is burying your argument

No one should have to work too hard to figure out what your article’s intervention is. As with the issue of niche, editors and reviewers need to be able to quickly see who you are in conversation with and what you are contributing to that conversation in order to evaluate—and advance—your submission.

Consider using subheadings to clearly signpost where your argument is going and to help the piece flow more coherently. Your introduction, in particular, should do some heavy lifting: it should offer a concise roadmap of your argument and include a mini literature review that names the scholars, researchers, and intellectual traditions you are engaging. Even if some of this work happens in footnotes or endnotes, it still needs to be visible.

5) You haven’t thoughtfully engaged with the reviewers’ suggestions

When your article goes through peer review, reviewers will provide comments outlining their suggestions for improvement. During the revision stage, you have the opportunity to respond to those comments before a final publication decision is made. This is your chance to demonstrate that you’ve taken their expertise seriously and engaged with their feedback in good faith.

A superficial or dismissive response to reviewers’ comments can be interpreted as a lack of appreciation for the time and labor they invested in your work. Acting as a peer reviewer is, at its core, an act of service to the field. Yes, there is ego involved. Yes, there is gatekeeping. These are unfortunate realities of academic publishing. Still, you can do a great deal to strengthen your article’s chances by showing reviewers that you respect their effort and have carefully considered their suggestions—even if ultimately you disagree with them.

Final thoughts

I know there is a lot of onus on you here—you need to do this; you need to be mindful of that; you need to respect this, etc.—but my point is to highlight the areas where you do have the power to increase your chances of getting published. There is nothing you can do about small, overextended reviewer pools, or journal staff with too much on their plates. You can, however, give your article the best chance possible by following and adhering to these guidelines.