Philosopher Leora Dahan Katz (currently a Polonsky Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, soon to join the Hebrew U faculty) writes:
It has been my experience that submission rejections (in philosophy and legal philosophy journals) that are not accompanied by reviewer comments are not only frustrating but also highly inefficient. Clearly whomever decided on the rejection had a reason for doing so, and yet blank rejections encourage resubmission without editing given that the author has no information about why the piece was rejected (e.g. whether it was a matter of quality or journal mismatch). It seems to me it would be fairly easy and low cost to relay the relevant information thereby both helping the author and preventing repetitious resubmission of pieces whose fault is obvious to editors.
For example, the disciple might adopt a list of basic reasons for rejection, one of which would be marked on any given rejection.
I have little experience editing the but the list might include some of the following:
- Quality of the piece found wanting
- Argument doesn’t work
- Not for our journal
- Too long
- Too broad
- Not ambitious enough
- Doesn’t engage relevant literature
- Not original/ No contribution to field 9. Badly written 10. Unclear 11. Not publishing paper of this kind at this time 12. Other
The final category of “other” would be necessary to keep the practice low-cost where the reason for rejection is non-standard. But authors would be no worse off than now, and in all those cases where rejection is for a “basic” reason, they would be far better off; as would the journals, since they would presumably receive less re-submissions of papers that should surely have been edited/submitted elsewhere/repurposed before resubmission.
I’m sure I’m not the first to have thought of this, but I do wonder why we don’t already have such a practice.
Readers?
