In Due Time: Eight Things You Need to Know to Get Authentic Race Research Published (Eventually)
There was a time I thought this paper would never be published. As the rejections piled on, I grew more emotionally detached from the paper. I also grew more frustrated: Where would this paper find a home? At least six anonymous peer reviewers said that this paper should not be published. I am guessing six, which reflects one from every journal to which I sent the paper, including the journal that finally accepted the paper.
In due time, however, after seven years, five journal rejections, and countless revisions, a portion of my M.A. thesis -- "Race and Trust: The Case of Medicine" -- is finally published in Social Science Research (SSR). The journal released the online first version of the article -- Disaggregating Ethnoracial Disparities in Physician Trust -- on Monday, July 13, 2015. I am unsure of when the printed article is set for publication.
Aside from a few Facebook updates, I've been fairly quiet about this final leg of the peer-review process. Primarily, I have been quiet because dejection and restraint have been my most faithful friends throughout the process of getting this paper published. I didn't get too excited when I sent the paper off to Social Science Research after spending three weeks revising it based off of the fifth journal's anonymous peer review comments. I didn't get too excited when I got the Revise and Resubmit (R&R). I refrained from telling my graduate school advisors about the progress of the paper. I didn't get too excited when I got the second R&R, which requested minor revisions and assured me the paper would not be sent back out again for anonymous peer review. And, then, I got the acceptance.
I screamed for hours -- mostly, to my mom. I ranted on and on about how treacherous the process had been, how I finally had something to show for all the sleepless nights, and how this was just the beginning. I cried some. But, mostly, I felt lucky. I could now update my CV to reflect another forthcoming paper. I could now mention a journal name as evidence of the quality of my work. I could now assure all those who had invested so dearly in me -- monetarily, emotionally, and socially -- that their investments were not for naught. I could now count.
After I submitted my revisions to the page proofs, I started to get really excited -- internally excited. Through the nine year process of writing this paper (the M.A. thesis itself was based off of some analysis I did during the Spring semester of my first year of graduate school), I had managed to teach myself some valuable lessons on how to do authentic quantitative race research in the Ivory Tower. One could say that I had given myself a blueprint. A blueprint on how to merge race theory with numbers and how to sell that bridge to a mainstream (i.e., generalist) audience.
I got the idea after my fourth rejection. I had sent the paper to the highest-ranking specialty journal in my field and received four lengthy comments from peer-reviewers, questioning everything about the paper -- from the conceptualization to the methods to the significance of the study. I was, needless to say, devastated. The paper had received many votes of confidence from its readers, including a paper award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. My peers, both more and less advanced, had gotten their M.A.'s published in high-quality journals; and yet, mine sat their on my desk looking at me -- reams of paper printing every version that would eventually but simply get rejected.
What was I doing wrong? Was it really possible to do authentic quantitative race research in the Ivory Tower? If I could not get my M.A. published, what chance did my Ph.D. thesis have of getting published? Was I all hype and no meat? These questions plagued me day in and day out for years -- oftentimes, taking me out of the revision game for months; other times, bolstering the challenges to focusing any revision requires. The process to publication, for me, taught me many lessons -- lessons which now make writing easier and revision formulaic. I hope to impart eight (8) of these lessons on to you now. Let's just call them:
The Eight (8) Things You Need to Know to Get Authentic Race Research Published
1. Be prepared. The Ivory Tower does not respond well to authentic race research. What is authentic race research? Authentic race research is research that connects race/racism theory to empirical data in critical and unapologetic ways. Because the Ivory Tower does not respond well to authentic race research, this type of research is often perceived as "specialty" work that is not "fit" for a general social science audience. The impact of this reality is that you as the writer have to continuously remind the reader of all the ways that race research is in fact mainstream research. Isn't sociology (my discipline) in fact the study of inequality?
2. Make sure your methods are tight. Have a methodologist or a statistician read your data, methods, and results section. Do not think that you can cut corners or use phrases like, "for your convenience". Do not make your work convenient read. Make it precise. The first time I sent my paper out for peer review, I used the most accurate methods that were available. Nobody had anything to say about the methods. Times 2, 3, 5, and 6 I watered down the methods in one way or the other, so as to convey a basic story, and I got slammed each time about the methods. The sixth time, I included a methodological appendix, which displayed the same results using the most sophisticated methods I could come up with, and that appendix saved me from a sixth rejection.
3. Make sure your conceptualization is tight. The fourth time I sent the paper out, I used the most sophisticated methods. I thought I was in the clear, and then the rejection came back. And, it was smoldering. Nobody liked my conceptualization of physician trust items as "dimensions". Two reviewers were dissatisfied with my connection of racial health care disparities to structural theories of race and racism. I was over-ambitious, I was told. And, what was the significance of this study anyways, reviewers questioned. That fourth rejection came while I was on the job market, and it seemed to discredit all of the attention I was getting there. I knew I needed help.
4. Don't be afraid to ask for help. During the Spring semester of my first year as a postdoc at Penn, I sought the help of a colleague of mine whom I felt was particularly good at writing literature reviews and front ends. This person read the first ten pages and suggested a major reorganization. The front end was leading readers to a results section that did not exist. The literature review had been organized around the different dimensions of physician trust. I subsequently reorganized the literature review around studies that found support for scaling physician trust items and studies that suggested disaggregating items was a better way to understand race differences in physician trust.
5. Do not rewrite the paper every time you get a rejection. For the first three rejections, I wholly rewrote the paper to fit what I thought reviewers wanted to see, given the comments of the most recent peer reviewers. Big no-no. What this essentially meant was that I was sending out a new paper to the next journal -- a paper that had barely benefited from the prior peer reviewers' feedback. The first paper did, in fact, need to be rewritten -- it was three papers in one -- and much lengthier than a standard journal article. However, papers 2-4 were intended to be the same paper, but came off to the reader as vastly different papers.
6. Do not write aimlessly. Aim for parallel structure. Parallelism is a literary device that involves successive verbal constructions that correspond to grammatical structure, sound, meter, meaning, etc." Going back to grade school, most of us learn parallelism in regards to sentence construction. However, there must also be parallelism in regards to the overall organization of the paper, the linking of the literature review to the results section, and the conversation between the opening paragraphs, the conclusion, and the discussion. This perhaps was the hardest lesson for me to learn. Over time, I came to think in tildes (~), which in mathematics means equivalence -- as in a ~ b means "a is equivalent to b". The tilde signals comparability not equality, so it provides a useful metaphor for thinking about the benefits and functions of parallelism. Now, I have gotten into a habit of writing papers, as I see them in my head, from the results section forward without necessarily knowing what the results will say. I have always been jealous of those individuals who can write linearly from introduction to discussion. However, I am not a linear thinker. I think more in circles rather than in steps or boxes. The impact of this reality is that I need to know where I am going before I can begin going there. In youth I labeled myself "The Roadless Traveler". Some would think that meant I did not know where I was going. Just the opposite: I did not know how I was going to get there. In hindsight, knowing where you are going is crucial to the budding writer-researcher-teacher, and parallel structure -- whether it starts from the back or the front of the paper -- can give you a roadmap to trace the segments of your thinking.
7. Tone down critical language. I say this with some hesitancy to the young fireball out there, but I say it anyway. After rejection number three, I cried to one of my mentors about the world not liking me. This person simply asked to read the latest version of the paper. After getting through a couple of paragraphs, this person looked up at me and said, "you are alienating people." From the subsequent conversation and exchange, I learned that the ultimate goal of research is to create a conversation among people interested in a particular phenomenon. When you attack people's work, you increase the likelihood that they will become protective of what they perceive as their territory and defensive of your claims to it. In subsequent revisions, I generalized the lesson to every part of the paper -- not just the opening paragraphs. Authentic race research makes people defensive (see Note 1). You do not want to be inauthentic by saying that racism does not matter or is not present in a particular phenomenon; however, you do want to be nuanced in the ways that you assert your reality. Everything is about perspective. Now, I will say that even when you "tone" things down with the most finesse that you can muster, there will be haters. My work has had more than a few. Hopefully, in these cases, there is an editor involved that can see through the ideological posturing of reviewers. If not, that journal is not the home for your work. Which leads me to my last point:
8. Every article has a home. When I first wrote my M.A., I intended to send it to a generalist sociology journal. That was my intended audience. After trying desperately to frame my paper as a substantive or theoretical paper, I realized that the primary contribution of my paper was not substantive, but methodological. Now, saying that might come off as ironic, given the methodological shortcuts I took throughout the peer review process (see Note 2). However, after a conversation with a mentor of mine who is a methodologist, it became quite clear that one of the surest ways to get authentic race research published is to harp on a methodological gap or flaw of past research. Methodological papers can be substantively innovative as well. In fact, in this paper, new substantive knowledge is discovered because I analyze physician trust differently than other researchers. For me, I choose to frame what I do as methodologically innovative rather than substantively innovative as a matter of politics. It is harder for people to come at me ideologically based on methods than on substance. And, if you do race research, there are no shortage of ideologues out there who will pick your work apart as a matter of principle.
To conclude, your work will find its way to print (eventually). Just keep sending it out. And, if the rejections start piling up, retool and take one or more of the words of advice I've offered here.
Best wishes.
In due time, however, after seven years, five journal rejections, and countless revisions, a portion of my M.A. thesis -- "Race and Trust: The Case of Medicine" -- is finally published in Social Science Research (SSR). The journal released the online first version of the article -- Disaggregating Ethnoracial Disparities in Physician Trust -- on Monday, July 13, 2015. I am unsure of when the printed article is set for publication.
Aside from a few Facebook updates, I've been fairly quiet about this final leg of the peer-review process. Primarily, I have been quiet because dejection and restraint have been my most faithful friends throughout the process of getting this paper published. I didn't get too excited when I sent the paper off to Social Science Research after spending three weeks revising it based off of the fifth journal's anonymous peer review comments. I didn't get too excited when I got the Revise and Resubmit (R&R). I refrained from telling my graduate school advisors about the progress of the paper. I didn't get too excited when I got the second R&R, which requested minor revisions and assured me the paper would not be sent back out again for anonymous peer review. And, then, I got the acceptance.
I screamed for hours -- mostly, to my mom. I ranted on and on about how treacherous the process had been, how I finally had something to show for all the sleepless nights, and how this was just the beginning. I cried some. But, mostly, I felt lucky. I could now update my CV to reflect another forthcoming paper. I could now mention a journal name as evidence of the quality of my work. I could now assure all those who had invested so dearly in me -- monetarily, emotionally, and socially -- that their investments were not for naught. I could now count.
After I submitted my revisions to the page proofs, I started to get really excited -- internally excited. Through the nine year process of writing this paper (the M.A. thesis itself was based off of some analysis I did during the Spring semester of my first year of graduate school), I had managed to teach myself some valuable lessons on how to do authentic quantitative race research in the Ivory Tower. One could say that I had given myself a blueprint. A blueprint on how to merge race theory with numbers and how to sell that bridge to a mainstream (i.e., generalist) audience.
I got the idea after my fourth rejection. I had sent the paper to the highest-ranking specialty journal in my field and received four lengthy comments from peer-reviewers, questioning everything about the paper -- from the conceptualization to the methods to the significance of the study. I was, needless to say, devastated. The paper had received many votes of confidence from its readers, including a paper award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. My peers, both more and less advanced, had gotten their M.A.'s published in high-quality journals; and yet, mine sat their on my desk looking at me -- reams of paper printing every version that would eventually but simply get rejected.
What was I doing wrong? Was it really possible to do authentic quantitative race research in the Ivory Tower? If I could not get my M.A. published, what chance did my Ph.D. thesis have of getting published? Was I all hype and no meat? These questions plagued me day in and day out for years -- oftentimes, taking me out of the revision game for months; other times, bolstering the challenges to focusing any revision requires. The process to publication, for me, taught me many lessons -- lessons which now make writing easier and revision formulaic. I hope to impart eight (8) of these lessons on to you now. Let's just call them:
The Eight (8) Things You Need to Know to Get Authentic Race Research Published
1. Be prepared. The Ivory Tower does not respond well to authentic race research. What is authentic race research? Authentic race research is research that connects race/racism theory to empirical data in critical and unapologetic ways. Because the Ivory Tower does not respond well to authentic race research, this type of research is often perceived as "specialty" work that is not "fit" for a general social science audience. The impact of this reality is that you as the writer have to continuously remind the reader of all the ways that race research is in fact mainstream research. Isn't sociology (my discipline) in fact the study of inequality?
2. Make sure your methods are tight. Have a methodologist or a statistician read your data, methods, and results section. Do not think that you can cut corners or use phrases like, "for your convenience". Do not make your work convenient read. Make it precise. The first time I sent my paper out for peer review, I used the most accurate methods that were available. Nobody had anything to say about the methods. Times 2, 3, 5, and 6 I watered down the methods in one way or the other, so as to convey a basic story, and I got slammed each time about the methods. The sixth time, I included a methodological appendix, which displayed the same results using the most sophisticated methods I could come up with, and that appendix saved me from a sixth rejection.
3. Make sure your conceptualization is tight. The fourth time I sent the paper out, I used the most sophisticated methods. I thought I was in the clear, and then the rejection came back. And, it was smoldering. Nobody liked my conceptualization of physician trust items as "dimensions". Two reviewers were dissatisfied with my connection of racial health care disparities to structural theories of race and racism. I was over-ambitious, I was told. And, what was the significance of this study anyways, reviewers questioned. That fourth rejection came while I was on the job market, and it seemed to discredit all of the attention I was getting there. I knew I needed help.
4. Don't be afraid to ask for help. During the Spring semester of my first year as a postdoc at Penn, I sought the help of a colleague of mine whom I felt was particularly good at writing literature reviews and front ends. This person read the first ten pages and suggested a major reorganization. The front end was leading readers to a results section that did not exist. The literature review had been organized around the different dimensions of physician trust. I subsequently reorganized the literature review around studies that found support for scaling physician trust items and studies that suggested disaggregating items was a better way to understand race differences in physician trust.
5. Do not rewrite the paper every time you get a rejection. For the first three rejections, I wholly rewrote the paper to fit what I thought reviewers wanted to see, given the comments of the most recent peer reviewers. Big no-no. What this essentially meant was that I was sending out a new paper to the next journal -- a paper that had barely benefited from the prior peer reviewers' feedback. The first paper did, in fact, need to be rewritten -- it was three papers in one -- and much lengthier than a standard journal article. However, papers 2-4 were intended to be the same paper, but came off to the reader as vastly different papers.
6. Do not write aimlessly. Aim for parallel structure. Parallelism is a literary device that involves successive verbal constructions that correspond to grammatical structure, sound, meter, meaning, etc." Going back to grade school, most of us learn parallelism in regards to sentence construction. However, there must also be parallelism in regards to the overall organization of the paper, the linking of the literature review to the results section, and the conversation between the opening paragraphs, the conclusion, and the discussion. This perhaps was the hardest lesson for me to learn. Over time, I came to think in tildes (~), which in mathematics means equivalence -- as in a ~ b means "a is equivalent to b". The tilde signals comparability not equality, so it provides a useful metaphor for thinking about the benefits and functions of parallelism. Now, I have gotten into a habit of writing papers, as I see them in my head, from the results section forward without necessarily knowing what the results will say. I have always been jealous of those individuals who can write linearly from introduction to discussion. However, I am not a linear thinker. I think more in circles rather than in steps or boxes. The impact of this reality is that I need to know where I am going before I can begin going there. In youth I labeled myself "The Roadless Traveler". Some would think that meant I did not know where I was going. Just the opposite: I did not know how I was going to get there. In hindsight, knowing where you are going is crucial to the budding writer-researcher-teacher, and parallel structure -- whether it starts from the back or the front of the paper -- can give you a roadmap to trace the segments of your thinking.
7. Tone down critical language. I say this with some hesitancy to the young fireball out there, but I say it anyway. After rejection number three, I cried to one of my mentors about the world not liking me. This person simply asked to read the latest version of the paper. After getting through a couple of paragraphs, this person looked up at me and said, "you are alienating people." From the subsequent conversation and exchange, I learned that the ultimate goal of research is to create a conversation among people interested in a particular phenomenon. When you attack people's work, you increase the likelihood that they will become protective of what they perceive as their territory and defensive of your claims to it. In subsequent revisions, I generalized the lesson to every part of the paper -- not just the opening paragraphs. Authentic race research makes people defensive (see Note 1). You do not want to be inauthentic by saying that racism does not matter or is not present in a particular phenomenon; however, you do want to be nuanced in the ways that you assert your reality. Everything is about perspective. Now, I will say that even when you "tone" things down with the most finesse that you can muster, there will be haters. My work has had more than a few. Hopefully, in these cases, there is an editor involved that can see through the ideological posturing of reviewers. If not, that journal is not the home for your work. Which leads me to my last point:
8. Every article has a home. When I first wrote my M.A., I intended to send it to a generalist sociology journal. That was my intended audience. After trying desperately to frame my paper as a substantive or theoretical paper, I realized that the primary contribution of my paper was not substantive, but methodological. Now, saying that might come off as ironic, given the methodological shortcuts I took throughout the peer review process (see Note 2). However, after a conversation with a mentor of mine who is a methodologist, it became quite clear that one of the surest ways to get authentic race research published is to harp on a methodological gap or flaw of past research. Methodological papers can be substantively innovative as well. In fact, in this paper, new substantive knowledge is discovered because I analyze physician trust differently than other researchers. For me, I choose to frame what I do as methodologically innovative rather than substantively innovative as a matter of politics. It is harder for people to come at me ideologically based on methods than on substance. And, if you do race research, there are no shortage of ideologues out there who will pick your work apart as a matter of principle.
To conclude, your work will find its way to print (eventually). Just keep sending it out. And, if the rejections start piling up, retool and take one or more of the words of advice I've offered here.
Best wishes.
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