So far this year, I have submitted 4 articles to respected peer-reviewed journals: 2 to Intelligence, 1 to the Journal of Criminal Justice (JCJ), and 1 to Crime & Delinquency (CD). Of these 4 articles, 2 of them (1 submitted to Intelligence and the one submitted to the JCJ) have been rejected,* and it is these articles whose story I want to tell in this post (why am I saying "whose" when I'm talking about academic papers, not people? It sounds weird, but I can't think of a less awkward way to word this sentence, so whatever.)
Let's start with the paper I submitted to Intelligence, which was actually based in large part on this post (which I posted here in December 2017). I actually copied and pasted the post into the Word document I submitted to the journal (but of course, I modified it a lot before submitting it--what, do you think I'm that stupid? Hah!). Anyway, I submitted it in March of this year--while writing this post I actually dug back into my emails and discovered that this paper was submitted on March 4. I also discovered that the title of the submission was "A scientific critique of four arguments made in support of hereditarianism".
It was rejected without opportunity for improvement the next day, which of course was depressing and discouraging, but not nearly as much as it would've been if I'd had a lot more experience with this entire process. Weirdly, though I could find the email confirming that they'd received my submission, I couldn't find the email saying they rejected it. But I do remember the gist of the reasons it was rejected: the editor-in-chief of Intelligence, Richard Haier, said that he thought my review of the literature was too selective. He had some other criticisms that I don't remember off the top of my head. So of course after getting this news I just gave up on this particular submission and tried to move on, and I have done so since then without any major obstacles.
So what about the second paper? The one submitted to the JCJ? Well, that one was submitted later this March and was based largely on my previous post criticizing the paper by Walsh & Yun published in the JCJ last year. This paper was submitted at night, before I went to bed, and the morning after, once I woke up and had time to check my email, I discovered that it had already been rejected within less than 12 hours! The journal's editor, Matt DeLisi, said that it was "out of scope"--which I think is BS, since the original Walsh/Yun paper was no less out of scope than any of the content in my critique was. I actually briefly tried to get this decision appealed but gave up after failing to find a remotely effective way to do so.
So I will end this post by answering another obvious question: what about the other 2 papers that I mentioned at the start of the post? Well, they are both still under review: the CD one was submitted almost 2 weeks ago and nothing seems to have happened since then** (which is certainly weird), and the other Intelligence one is also still under review* (less surprising since I just submitted it last night). The subject of the CD one is whether the % of suicides committed with guns is a valid proxy for gun ownership over time, and the Intelligence paper is a meta-analysis of the black-white (mean) IQ gap in the US. Another obvious contrast between these submissions is that the CD one still says "awaiting reviewer selection" 12 days after I submitted it (on May 13), and the Intelligence one has already assigned a reviewer! Certainly this is not the kind of experience that will make me enthusiastic about submitting something to another SAGE journal in the future, to say the least.
*Update 5/25/18: the other Intelligence submission was just rejected as well.
**Update 6/20/18: the CD one has also been rejected.
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