Invited submissions

They're not always the "easy pub" you're expecting.

---

Since I began my academic career, I've been involved in about four invited submissions. An invited submission is when the editor of a journal invites you to submit a paper--empirical or review--on a particular topic.

The cool thing about invited reviews is that, because the editor contacted you, the chance that your submission will be published is almost guaranteed.

I contributed to my first invited submission during my first year of graduate school. My advisor was contacted by the editors of a book who asked if he would write a chapter on a prominent theory of adolescent risk taking. My advisor thought writing chapters for books was a waste of time because everything is online these days and so no one reads the books (lol). Nevertheless, he invited my lab mate and I to write the chapter because, as first years, it was good practice. We eagerly agreed.

My lab mate and I actually had a lot of fun writing the chapter. It was our pride and joy. Our advisor was so impressed, he asked the editors to take his name off the chapter since we had written it all. This request was declined, of course, because academia is not exempt from politics. You see, our names meant nothing and our advisor's name meant a lot. It seems that more important than the quality of the writing and the ethics of authorship was having the name of an expert attached to this chapter. So our advisor's name was added last.

Aside from the authorship debacle, this invited submission was a pretty positive and straightforward experience. Like any publication, our submission was peer-reviewed, we went through a round of edits, and then the chapter was published.

If only all invited submissions could be so simple...

During my postdoc, I have contributed to three more invited submissions. Two of them have been... excruciating. I'm in the middle of one now, actually; hence this post.

Although I naively thought that invited submissions were always 'easy' publications, this fact really depends on the editor. Some editors are incredibly picky. It's especially frustrating when the editors are clearly trying to get you to write the paper they want you to write instead of of the paper you want to write.

One invited submission I contributed to was supposed to be an easy and quick way to get a publication on my CV with my new postdoc mentors. In actuality, the whole process took about a year. Yes, really. A whole year. The editor sent our paper out for review and we received tons of comments and concerns. The editor said he would review our revisions rather than sending our paper back out for review, but this was not the case. It went back out for review. Several weeks later, our manuscript was returned with even more comments. We addressed them again. Then, the editor had a few things to say for themselves. For months, we went back and forth clarifying the language and defending the methods in our manuscript. Finally, it was published.

More recently, I was invited to write a review on a theory that is near and dear to my heart. I wrote my dissertation on this topic and have already published two papers on this theory (one conceptual, one empirical) in respected journals. My co-author and I thought writing this paper would be a breeze.

We were wrong.

We are now on our third round of revisions. Third!! Despite my firm belief that no other paper has provided such a thorough and thoughtful theoretical basis for this topic, nothing that I write seems to be enough. The editors continue to poke holes in my arguments, bringing up exceptions and alternate ideas, as if forgetting that human behavior is not an exact science; that there will always be some flaw or exception to a theory. This, to me, is a case where the editor has their own idea about how the paper should look and they do not want to back down until it gets there. If the editor is still unsatisfied after this third round, I'm not totally sure my co-author and I will even move forward with this journal (an option that's on the table only because my co-author is a well-established, senior scholar). Of course I want to publish an excellent paper. I also want to publish my thoughts, not someone else's.

---

I'll let you all know how things pan out with this latest submission. Will the editors finally be satisfied with the paper or will my co-author and I have to consider backing out of this invitation? Time will tell. In the meantime, I guess I better get back to the revisions...

Good luck out there,

Natasha