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Bad journal practices: the case of rejection without reasons after R&R

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JUNE 24–COMMENTS ARE NOW OPEN, AT THE REQUEST OF READERS.  SUBMIT COMMENTS ONLY ONCE, THEY MAY TAKE AWHILE TO APPEAR.

A philosopher elsewhere shared this appalling story:

[A] paper I submitted on an r+r, for which I met every suggestion of the reader, was rejected because that same reader said "Reject" and gave no reason. The editors say that they cannot request the reader's reasons or go any further even though they liked the piece. It's just not supposed to work that way, is it?—we need to read the reasons in order to learn to improve; and in the absence of willingness to give reasons one worries about biases.

The journal editors here are incompetent:  they are responsible for final decisions, and they can of course demand reasons from referees, and should have done so.   I hope this is not a common occurrence, but I don't have the sense that it is.

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10 responses to “Bad journal practices: the case of rejection without reasons after R&R”

  1. Doris

    My sense, admittedly based on my own a small sample and second-hand reports, is that philosophy editors passing along, and acting on, cursory, unprofessional, and marginally competent referee reports is, of late, too commonplace.

    At one top generalist journal (where editorial leadership has long been vocal about best journal practices), one referee report relayed to me proudly proclaimed, at the end of its one short paragraph, “tldr”’; at a top specialty journal, one referee declared, at the end of their short paragraph, “there are lots of big problems with this paper” – while declining to state what these problems were. (I won’t say that the paper in question merited publication in these venues; I will say, based on feedback from numerous workshops and talks, that it was a credible professional submission.)

    If the editors are actually making decisions based on such excremental reports, this strikes me as editorial malpractice; if they are using such reports as cover for rejection based on their own judgment about suitability or journal space, it would be better to be transparent about it. The practice of relaying and relying on manifestly unprofessional referee reports (further?) undermines the credibility of the “journal system.”

    While I hesitate to advocate for more desk rejections, a note to submitting authors saying that the journal was unable to secure appropriate referee reports and — please! – a note to offending referees suggesting that they aspire to higher standards in the future, might well be preferable to some of the current performances, which are at risk of appearing in bad faith.

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  2. J

    At least philosophy journals don't charge for submitting articles, which is common in other disciplines. A fellow colleague at my university submitted a paper to a well-known journal which charges €500 for each submission. The paper was based on years of empirical work and containing a lot of qualitative data that was discussed in detail. The paper was desk-rejected in less than a week, with no comments given. And no refund.

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  3. David Ross

    EIC of a math journal here, also with some experience (as an author and reviewer) with philosophy journals. If the author's report above is complete and accurate, then it was not best practice on the part of the journal. However, it should be noted that an author's perception of what has transpired does not always match the reality. I have been in lengthy discussions with authors who assumed that X was the reason we rejected their paper, when the reason was Y.

    Even if the report was accurate, there might be legitimate reasons for it. When we get a revision, we ask the reviewer if the problems they identified were addressed to their satisfaction, and if they now recommend acceptance. Sometimes they respond with a cursory answer. I don't recall an author ever objecting to a cursory "yes". If it is "no", we try to get more to help us with our decision and to pass back to the author, but if we don't we are still left with making a decision based on our reviewer, a trusted expert in the area, advising us to reject. In that case rejection is probably the most natural course.

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  4. L

    I disagree that rejection is the most natural course after a cursory "no" from a reviewer. It's not the reviewer's job to make a decision about the paper, but the editor's. I'd say rejection is only warranted if the reviewer convinces the editor that the submission is not acceptable. Good credentials of the reviewer are not sufficient: an empty review is not credible and should probably be discarded.

    However, it's possible with the example shared above that reasons were provided to the editor only. There might be legitimate reasons for a reviewer to not give feedback to the author. In that case, I think the editor should provide reasons for rejection in their own words.

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  5. David Ross

    I agree that cursory reviews should not be used to make publication decisions (whether positive or negative). That does not seem to be the situation here.

    In my example the "no" was to "did the author address the concerns in your earlier review", and not to "should we publish". Presumably the review that led to a r+r (as opposed to something more positive, like "revisions required") was relatively negative, so the default will naturally remain rejection. (I completely disagree that "rejection is only warranted if the reviewer convinces the editor that the submission is not acceptable". In any credible journal the burden of proof is on the author to make a case for publication.) The reasons for rejection are pretty clear, since they were enumerated in the first review; if the reviewer says they still haven't been addressed, it isn't always the case there is much more substantive that she (or I) can say.

    As I said, in this situation I will try to get more information from the reviewer, but if I can't (or if the reviewer tells me things on the side that I can't or won't communicate to the author) then we have to make a decision based on the evidence before us. If I've had full, credible reviews from top people in the field, but they don't want to do a full second review of a revision, I'm probably not going to send the paper out for further review.

    Like any active researcher who has been in the business as long as I have, I've had my fair share of editorial decisions as an author which I thought were wrong, capricious, or downright bizarre. I try really hard to let these experiences inform the way we treat our would-be authors. Sometimes, however, you get someone who hears what they want to hear, and not what they are actually being told by the editor or reviewers.

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  6. L

    I'm aware we were discussing a case of r+r in which the revisions are sent to the same reviewer. The problem with a cursory "the revisions have not been addressed" is that it isn't very likely that the reviewer has seriously looked at the paper again. Even worse, it might be that they just have an irrational dislike of the paper. Presumably, the author has sent a list of responses to all of the reviewer's comments in the first review. Why couldn't the reviewer respond to a single one of them? Even giving one example of how the changes do not address the comment would be sufficient to make the review credible.

    If a reviewer doesn't want to review a second time, it means either of two things. One, the paper was unpublishable from the beginning, and should have been rejected instead of receiving a r+r. Or two, the reviewer thinks the paper was never publishable but the editor disagrees, in which case they should send the revised paper to different reviewers.

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  7. Steven Hales

    I’ve got to be honest—if I recommend R&R and the author makes a good faith effort to address my concerns, I’m going to green-light the revised version, even if I’m still not 100% convinced. Why be a jerk? If I hated the paper I would have voted no the first time.

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  8. David Ross

    At some point the editor has to decide whether he has amassed sufficient evidence on which to base a final decision. All I was trying to do above is offer a scenario where a responsible editor might have decided that he did have enough to support rejection, but also where the responses to the author might have been as described.

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  9. Matías Vernengo

    As an editor of a Journal (Review of Keynesian Economics) and a Dictionary (The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics) I would say that the editors have discretionary power in such a case to publish the paper if they want to. It seems that editors are at fault, as much, if not more than the referee.

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  10. anonymous assistant professor

    I'm not sure if anyone will see this given that I'm late to this conversation, but my experience with R&Rs (as author, not editor) suggests the possibility that the referee who said no said no the first time too (I've had this happen three times and two of those times they sent the paper back to the reject-recommending referee and they rejected it). I don't think that the case sounds like the editor necessarily behaved badly (for some of the reasons above), but I do think it sounds like it could be a case like this. In such cases, it would be good for editors to (a) make that clear to authors that one referee recommended rejection and (b) make clear whether they intend to (attempt to) send the paper back to the same referee. It's not always worth revising a paper, especially if you don't like the suggestions, and if one referee recommended rejection from the beginning there is sometimes nothing you can do to convince them (and I think they sometimes might get even grumpier about the paper since the editor didn't take their initial recommendation!).

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