Overcame all of the imposter syndrome to submit my journal article to what I thought was a really good fit.
Rejected, not even sent out for review. "Not a good fit" and all that.
One of the things about trying to do interdisciplinary work is that the demands to pick a lane and stay with it are often not subtle or implied, but instead are very direct and blunt.
@MichaelTBacon That sucks!
It's happened to me too, even in non-interdisciplinary work where the topic is right at the core of the field.
@mplouffe I shouldn't take this too hard, but actually getting articles out the door for consideration has been a huge hangup for me and something I've struggled with.
I was ready for a rejection but I honestly thought I'd get a review.
@MichaelTBacon
That was a huge challenge for me in my first few PhD years. Trying to make it perfect and adjusting to UK HE meant I had too many sideways passes and not enough shots on goal, to use the soccer metaphor.
At least in my experience, time and many many more rejections have made it less difficult. The other parts of the job, not so much 😂
@mplouffe Thanks. After a bit of a walk with some fresh air and what sunshine January can muster, I think I need to aim lower. I had tried to make this my "impact" paper and was going to add on lower impact articles with more fine grained stuff. But I think I need to just get this out there.
There's part of my brain that says, "I'm 49, I don't have time to build up a base of minor journal articles" and I hear another part of my brain saying, "that's fine, but that's a you problem."
@MichaelTBacon I tried that with one of mine, it ended up sitting on my drive for about a decade (I ended up getting kinda lucky at that point).
I'm not sure what the journal ecosystem looks like for you, but maybe try the second 'biggest' to see how things go? There's a ton of randomness in decisions, and I often find it challenging to remember that when trying to just get something landed.
@mplouffe The other annoyance is that this started out as about 22k words from my dissertation which I painfully chiseled down to 9600 words to fit this journal. My next-down journal choices mostly have an 8k word limit which means I have yet another round of chiseling before I can submit.
But thanks for your kind words and advice.
