One of my papers got declined today

In 2005, my paper on breaking RSA by observing a single private-key operation from a different hyperthread sharing the same L1 cache -- literally the first publication of a cryptographic attack exploiting shared caches -- was rejected from the cryptology preprint archive on the grounds that &quot;it was about CPU architecture, not cryptography&quot;. Rejection from journals is like rejection from VCs -- it happens all the time and often not for any good reason.<p>(That paper has now been cited 971 times according to Google Scholar, despite never appearing in a journal.)

I was confused by the title because paper rejection is incredibly common in research, but that&#x27;s the point and one of the goals is to fight imposter syndrome.<p>It&#x27;s a good initiative. Next step: everybody realizes that researchers are just random people like everybody. Maybe that could kill any remaining imposter syndrome.<p>A rejection, although common, is quite tough during your PhD though, even ignoring the imposter syndrome, because in a short time, you are expected to have a bunch of accepted papers, in prestigious publications if possible. It feels like a rejection slows you down, and the clock is still ticking. If we could kill some of this nefarious system, that&#x27;d be good as well.

Adam Grant once related an amusing rejection from a double-blind review. One of the reviewers justified the rejection with something along the lines of “The author would do well to familiarize themselves with the work of Adam Grant”

I find it refreshing when researchers disclose their own failures. Science is made of negative results, errors, and rejections, though it&#x27;s often characterized in a much different, unrealistic way.<p>By the way, even though some of you may know about it, here&#x27;s the link to the Journal of Negative Results: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jnr-eeb.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;jnr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jnr-eeb.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;jnr</a>

I am actually quite surprised Terence Tao still gets papers rejected from math journals... but appreciate him sharing this, as hearing this from him will help newer scientists not get discouraged by a rejection.<p>I had the lucky opportunity to do a postdoc with one of the most famous people in my field, and I was shocked how much difference the name did make- I never had a paper rejection from top tier journals submitting with him as the corresponding author. I am fairly certain the editors would have rejected my work for not being fundamentally on an interesting enough topic to them, if not for the name. The fact that a big name is interested in something, alone can make it a &quot;high impact subject.&quot;

The master has failed more than the beginner has tried.

&quot;Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average.&quot;<p>This feels like a superhuman trying to empathize with a regular person.

Non-zero failure rate is indeed often optimal because it provides valuable feedback toward finding the optimal horizon for various metrics, e.g. speed, quality, LPU[1], etc.<p>That said, given the labor involved in academic publishing and review, the optimal rejection rate should be quite low, i.e. find a lower cost way to pre-filter papers. OTOH, the reviewers may get value from rejected papers...<p>[1] least publishable unit

If you stick around in physics long enough you will submit a paper to <i>Physical Review Letters</i> (which is limited to about four pages) that gets rejected because it isn&#x27;t of general enough interest, then you resubmit to some other section of <i>The Physical Review</i> and get in.<p>These days I read a lot of CS papers with an eye on solving the problems and personally I tend to find the short ones useless. (e.g. pay $30 for a 4-page paper because it supposedly has a good ranking function for named entity recognition except... it isn&#x27;t a good ranking function)

Sure, even top mathematicians have paper rejections.<p>But I think the more important point is that very few people are capable of publishing papers in top math journals.

&gt; Because of this, a perception can be created that all of one&#x27;s peers are achieving either success or controversy, with one&#x27;s own personal career ending up becoming the only known source of examples of &quot;mundane&quot; failure.<p>I&#x27;ve found similar insights when I joined a community of musicians and also discovered twitch &#x2F; youtube presences of musicians I listen to. Some of Dragonforces corona streams are absolutely worth a watch.<p>It&#x27;s easy to listen to mixed and finished albums and... despair to a degree. How could anyone learn to become that good? It must be impossible, giving up seems the only rational choice.<p>But in reality, people struggle and fumble along at their level. Sure enough, the level of someone playing guitar professionally for 20 years is a tad higher than mine, but that really, really perfect album take? That&#x27;s the one take out of a couple dozen.<p>This really helped me &quot;ground&quot; or &quot;calibrate&quot; my sense of how good or how bad I am and gave me a better appreciation of how much of a marathon an instrument can be.

Academia is a paper tiger. The Internet means you don&#x27;t need a publisher for your work. Ironically, this self published blog might be one of his most read works yet.

I agree with the discussion that rejection is normal and researchers should discuss it more often.<p>That said, I do think that &quot;publish or perish&quot; plays an unspoken role here. I see a lot of colleagues trying to push out &quot;least publishable units&quot; that might barely pass review (by definition). If you need to juice your metrics, it&#x27;s a common strategy that people employ. Still, I think a lot of papers would pass peer review more easily if researchers just combined multiple results into a single longer paper. I find those papers to be easier to read since they require less boilerplate, and I imagine they would be easier to pass peer review by the virtue that they simply contain more significant results.

I always thought that part of the upside of being tenured and extremely recognised as a leader of your field is the freedom to submit to incredibly obscure (non-predatory) journals just for fun.

In academic publishing, there is an implicit agreement between the authors and the journal to roughly match the importance of the paper to the prestige of the journal. Since there is no universal standard on either the prestige of the journal or the importance of the paper, mismatches happen regularly, and rejection is the natural result. In fact, the only way to avoid rejections is to submit a paper to a journal of lower prestige than your estimate, which is clearly not what authors want to do.

A similar story.<p>I actively blogged about my thesis and it somehow came up in one of those older-model plagarism detectors (this was years and years ago, it might have been just some hamfisted google search).<p>The (boomer) profs convened a &#x27;panel&#x27; without my knowledge and decided I had in fact plagiarized, and informed me I was in deep doo doo. I was pretty much ready to lose my mind, my career was over, years wasted, etc.<p>Luckily I was buddy with a Princeton prof. who had dealt with this sort of thing and he guided me through the minefield. I came out fine, but my school never apologized.<p>Failure is often just temporary and might not even be real failure.

This is his main point, and I wholeheartedly agree: <i>…a perception can be created that all of one&#x27;s peers are achieving either success or controversy, with one&#x27;s own personal career ending up becoming the only known source of examples of &quot;mundane&quot; failure. I speculate that this may be a contributor to the &quot;impostor syndrome&quot;…</i>

Research is getting more and more specialized. Increasingly there may not be many potential journals for a paper, and, even if there are, the paper might be sent to the same reviewers (small sub communities).<p>You may have to leave a year of work on arxiv, with the expectation that the work will be rehashed and used in other published papers.

Journals are typically for-profit, and science is not, so they don&#x27;t always align and we should not expect journals to serve science except incidentally.

Please note that despite much work being done in the equality department being famous is nowadays still a requirement for acquiring the status of impostor syndrome achiever. Persons who are not really famous do not have impostor syndrome but are just a simple copycats in this respect.

Rejection Therapy ftw. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rejection_Therapy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rejection_Therapy</a>

We can laugh at academia but we know of these similar rejection stories nearly in all domains.<p>AirBnB being rejected for funding, musicians like Schubert struggling their entire life, writers like Rowling in poverty.<p>Rejection will always be the norm in competitive winner take all dynamics.

We often talk about how important it is to be a platform for oneself, self-host blog under own domain etc. Why it is not the case for science papers, articles, issues? Like, isn&#x27;t the whole World Wide Web was invented specifically for that?

Saw the title and thought, nothing unusual in that really, then saw the domain was maths based, it&#x27;s not Terrence Tao is it?! It was Terrence Tao. If one of the greats can get rejected then there&#x27;s no shame in you getting rejected.

Whether it’s a journal, a university, a tech company… never take it personally because there’s bureaucracy, policies, etc and information lost in the operation of the whole process. Cast a wide net and believe in the value you’ve created or bring.

Reminds me—I wish someone would make an anti-LinkedIn, where the norm is to announce only setbacks and mistakes, disappointments etc.

It’s okay Terence, it happens to the best of us.

It&#x27;s important to remember there a journal&#x27;s reputation is built by the authors who publish there, and not vice versa.

Should we therefore also publicize everything else that lies between success and failure?

- hey honey how was work today?<p>- it was fine, I desk rejected terence tao, his result was a bit meh and the write up wasn&#x27;t up to my standard. Then I had a bit of a quite office hour, anyway, ...

Why journals exist at all? Could papers be published on something like arxiv.org (like software is on github.com)?<p>It could support links&#x2F;backref, citations(forks), questions(discussions), tags, followers, etc easily.

fwiw, editorial review =&#x2F;= peer review

The second post in that thread is gold:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>... I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result with an &quot;epsilon loss&quot; in a key parameter. We submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted.<p>The following year, we managed to finally prove the full conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!<p>...<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;

The high standards of those academic journals sound incredible in this day and age when media is full of misinformation and irrelevant information.<p>The anecdote about the highly reputable journal rejecting the second of a 2-part paper which (presumably) would have been accepted as a 1-part paper is telling.

Hilarious irony:<p>&gt; With hindsight, some of my past rejections have become amusing. With a coauthor, I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result with an &quot;epsilon loss&quot; in a key parameter. We submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted.<p>&gt; The following year, we managed to finally prove the full conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!

I wish I has an IQ that high...