New Papers and Editorial Thoughts: Your Paper Got Rejected—Now What?
I hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the new year! At Organization Science, we have several new articles to share and a terrific piece by Lindy Greer on how to handle rejections—a topic I find especially helpful as I prepare for a career that will inevitably include many of them. Feel free to share your experiences with rejection and any coping strategies in the comments!
I’ve certainly experienced my share of rejection from my days working on cross‐border M&As. Back then, one motto we used was “Never fall in love with a deal.” But that was easier said than done. After spending months or even years tracking a target and conducting due diligence, it was tough to see a project turned down by top management, blocked in a government review, or rejected outright by the seller.
I recall one deal in Ghana to which I devoted considerable effort—an asset touted as the biggest discovery in a decade. Our board, however, turned down the proposal because Ghana was new to our portfolio, and they believed we needed to account for higher risk—prompting us to bid nearly one-third less than ExxonMobil. Yet a decade later, that celebrated asset failed to deliver—and in hindsight, that rejection proved to be quite fortunate.
There are a lot of technology papers in this batch, including one on the electricity that inevitably give them life. We also have a paper on the history of corporate research, regulation of technology, and the intersection of private investment and open source communities. Enjoy!
—Shirley
Newly Accepted Papers:
John Eklund, Manav Raj, J. P. Eggers
Senior managers must pay attention to a lot of things. However, simply paying attention to these items does not mean that firms take action. We argue that attention to competing issues and the breadth of managerial strategic attention will impair the relationship between attention to a focal issue and related organizational action, as these attentional constraints can lead to hesitancy or confusion (individual level) and reduced coordination (organization-level). Such constraints will be particularly important in smaller firms that do not have sufficient resources to manage a broad array of issues. Studying the U.S. electric utility industry and the emerging new distributed electricity generation business model, we find broad support for our arguments but also important nuance. For example, greater attention to customer or low-cost strategies further dampens the translation of attention to the new model to subsequent investment.
Michael Park, Shuping Wu, Russell J. Funk
The dynamics between regulation and innovation has been a longstanding interest of scholars, managers, and policymakers alike. Interestingly, previous literature offers conflicting evidence on how the restrictiveness of the regulatory environment—the amount of rules that prohibit specific activities—affects innovation of firms. One camp suggests that restrictiveness circumscribes the range of available technological components and therefore decreases innovation. The other camp believes that restrictiveness can lead firms to seek new alternative technological components, which could increase innovation. In this article, using a novel, exhaustive, and text-based dataset on regulation, the authors develop a theory on regulation and innovation to reconcile these views. From 1994 to 2013 across 1,242 firms, the authors find that restrictiveness can have both a negative and positive relationship with innovation output depending on the level of regulatory uncertainty and the innovation type in question.
Annamaria Conti, Christian Peukert, Maria P. Roche
We explore the relationship between early-stage startups’ activities on GitHub and their funding outcomes. Analyzing data from over 160,000 U.S. startups, we find that those participating in open source communities gain valuable access to external knowledge. This access can facilitate innovation, support the development of minimum viable products, and contribute to reaching funding milestones. Startups working on novel technologies appear to derive greater benefits, although the impact varies with market conditions. This research offers nuanced insights into how open source engagement can shape startups’ journeys toward growth and innovation.
The Rise of Scientific Research in Corporate America
Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Konstantin Kosenko, Jungkyu Suh, Yishay Yafeh
Google’s recent breakthrough in quantum computing was a reminder of the importance of corporate research. Why do for-profit businesses invest in creating new knowledge, much of which could spill over to rivals, and when it is challenging to manage research? This paper argues that corporate research in American firms arose in the 1920s to compensate for inadequate university research, particularly of the type relevant to the needs of firms on the technological frontier. Analysis of a comprehensive dataset from the interwar period reveals that breakthrough innovations increasingly relied on science. To compensate for inadequate university research, firms on the technology frontier, such as GE, AT&T, DuPont, and Kodak, created internal research capabilities to overcome technology barriers.
Your Paper Got Rejected—Now What?
-Lindy Greer
Having our papers rejected is a painful process for all of us. Months - and more often years - of effort, focus, and love go into our projects. Having a review team not see the full value of our work is one of the harder moments in our job. I offer some thoughts in this newsletter on ways to navigate these moments and push forward the work we love. Before I start, a huge thank you to my colleagues in the Sanger Leadership Research Lab at the University of Michigan (especially huge shout outs to Siyu Yu and Jim Walsh) for their help with these tips.
Please Ask a Friend to Stop You From:
Permanently back-burnering and/or trashing the paper - Don’t give up! If you loved the paper enough to send it out, don’t let the reviews hold you back from going forward. The longer you avoid revising a rejected paper, the harder it feels to pick it back up. This is especially true if you’ve had several papers rejected lately (rejections often seem to come in waves).
Submitting the paper with no changes to a new journal - The odds of that grumpy Reviewer 2 getting the paper at the new journal and continuing to haunt you are higher than you think. Plus, you thought they were irritable before? Wait for them now, when they see the paper at a new place unchanged.
Making so many changes the paper becomes a ‘Frankenstein’ paper - The opposite tendency to sending it out with no changes is to instead change every line of the paper. This includes adding in 30 footnotes to placate Reviewers 2 and 3. When the new journal gets the paper, these ‘Frankenstein’ papers, where the focus is lost and many extraneous (and at times seemingly unrelated) ideas dot the entire manuscript scream ‘I was just rejected’. Similarly, sometimes we revise papers in a self-effacing way to appease past reviewers, where again our clarity of voice and importance of message can get lost. Not only will all this not start the paper off in the most positive light with the new review team, you’re also not submitting the best version of your paper.
Tips to Care for Yourself and Move Your Work Forward:
Give yourself a specific time period for self-care (acknowledge and care for your emotions). Rejections are hard - full stop. I know my personal first go-to is to pretend it didn’t happen for a few weeks. Eventually, my more mature coauthors convince me to face reality and move forward again. During this mourning period, acknowledge your emotions and let yourself feel what you feel. Give yourself permission to mourn - be it a few days or a few weeks, and ask a coauthor or friend to reach out to hold you accountable to move forward again afterwards.
In chatting with my colleagues about how they get through the mourning period, I heard suggestions for rejection treats (treat yourself to something, even if it’s just an ice cream and Netflix evening), a rejection Spotify playlist (fill it with empowering songs like Shake It Off and blast it on repeat to get your spirits up), and looking at your personal wins list (if you don’t have one, also a great thing to make after a rejection - what are the small things at work that have gone well or helped others in the last year(s)?).Make a plan to move forward again. After you’ve taken the time and space to acknowledge the negative emotions and care for yourself and it’s time to move forward again, regulating our emotions around the rejection and getting into the right mindset are important to move forward. You could leverage research on psychological distancing by imagining what a mentor would tell you to do in response to the rejection. Or you could leverage the research on growth mindset by reframing the rejection for yourself as a challenge rather than a threat. For example, print the rejection email and write “Challenge accepted!” at the top.
Get in motion: Choose a new outlet, and a concrete small change you can make to the paper to get it going again. Even one small step forward is progress, and can help get you into motion.
Leverage a friend support group for motivation and accountability: Gather your coauthors (or just a few friends) and share strategies for handling reviewer comments—so one can feel less alone and brainstorm solutions.
Prioritize the major changes that will make your paper better. Identify common themes: Look for recurring feedback themes like “unclear contribution,” “not enough data,” or “design flaws,” and address them systematically in your revision (and any future work). Jim Walsh at the University of Michigan recommends making a grid like in Table 1 as a helpful way to identify the themes from the review team and how they overlap with your own read of the paper and what you want to achieve with it. Leave the smaller matters of taste by the wayside (and avoid the footnotes - remember, no frankenstein papers!). Keep your voice clear and confident and focus on what truly makes the paper better in both content and tone.
Always make sure to keep fine-tuning the framing - One of the main challenges in many rejected papers is finding the right audience, clarifying the problem you are solving for them, and how your solution changes their conversation. If contribution was at all mentioned in the letter from the review team (certainly, I see it in the majority of letters I see at OS), this might be a good time to take a step back and ask:
What is the intersection among the Venn diagram circles of topics in your area with a good-sized audience (5-20 scholars with work in this area) that would be interested in your paper? How can you better clarify who these people are in the first paragraph or two of your paper to help the next handling editor choose reviewers who will get what you are doing the best? How can you choose keywords that best target this area? Or suggest people in this area as reviewers?
What’s your value-add for this dialogue? How do you change their thinking? I personally always love the Grant & Pollock AMJ editorial on setting the hook, and their idea that most high-impact papers have some level of framing of consensus destruction or creation - that papers truly change, not just add to, the quality of a dialogue in the space. As their article notes, authors of top tier papers they surveyed spent 24% of their time on the paper just on writing (and rewriting) those first two or three pages of introduction.
Get friendly reviews before you submit to the next outlet. To help ensure the north start of your paper is clear and the changes you’ve made to the paper are indeed moving it forward, I’d always suggest asking a colleague or two to take a quick glance at the new version of the paper to see if it has improved in content and coherency or is looking a little Franken-steiny. Someone new to the paper will have fresh eyes to help you improve your framing, theorizing, and empirics. We all can get so embedded in our work that it’s hard to see the forest through the trees. A helpful colleague may be a way to break through.
Celebrate your resubmission. It’s easy to overlook this as a victory and just keep pushing on to the next project. Make sure to take the time to stand still by what you’ve done here. You did something really courageous - you took feedback, cared for yourself, connected with others, grew from it, and sent a better publication to a new journal. Here are a few ideas to celebrate:
Update your CV and project lists as having this paper under review. Updating this status is a great way to remind yourself that your work is moving forward.
Make sure to celebrate having gotten to this big milestone. What could you do to celebrate? Maybe it’s a special dinner out, an afternoon off, or a gift to yourself.
Send a gratitude note to your coauthors, friendly reviewers, and emotional supporters to say thank you and let them know the paper is back out. They’ll appreciate it, be cheering for you, and this all will only amplify your positive emotions from the experience.
Table 1.
