How to get published when your reviewers don’t get it

Question:

I find that I keep running into the same wall: I can’t get my studies accepted into the journals in which I need to publish. My work, on reproductive labour and economic precarity, draws on Black Feminist theoretical frameworks that my peer reviewers seem to find at best unfamiliar and, at worst, ideologically suspect. I’ve had desk rejections from journals my department considers high-impact, and I’ve received reviewer comments that seem to be objecting to my theoretical commitments rather than my methods or evidence. My department chair has been supportive, but she’s also been clear that I need publications in high-impact journals before I go up for tenure. How do I get rigorous, theoretically committed work past reviewers who don’t appear to share my assumptions? And can I do it without softening my arguments to the point that I no longer recognize them?

— Anonymous, Economics 

Dr. Editor’s response:

I’m sure it won’t be surprising, dear letter-writer, for you to hear that you’re describing a systemic problem: reviewers steeped in one theoretical tradition often struggle to evaluate work built on a different one.  

What, I hope, no one here wants — not you, not your chair, not me — is assimilation, in which you soften and dilute your work to make it acceptable to dominant paradigms. Instead, what I think and hope we all want, ultimately, is what Vlasta Sikimić (2023) calls “epistemic inclusion”: what happens when a field encounters an unfamiliar way of thinking and neither rejects it nor simply tolerates it at a distance, instead letting that encounter change its own thinking. If we had epistemic inclusion, you wouldn’t have to give up your framework or trade it in for the field’s existing assumptions in order to be taken seriously. But your ideas wouldn’t be frozen in place either: like anyone in a nuanced intellectual exchange, your thinking would keep developing, too, through engagement rather than through pressure to conform.  

It doesn’t sound from your letter like your field is in that place at the moment, and I want to acknowledge that up front because I want to be clear that no individual researcher can write their way out of systemic and epistemic exclusion. But I also hold out hope that we’re not in a dichotomy here: that, because there isn’t true epistemic inclusion, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your ideas will always be excluded. My hope is that you have both allies and open minds among your peer reviewers, and that you can reach them by adopting select writing strategies tailored to your context.  

To best advise you on these writing strategies, I spoke with Cathy Hannabach of Ideas on Fire, an academic editing and indexing agency specializing in interdisciplinary scholarship. As Dr. Hannabach put it, “what’s often being evaluated isn’t actually the quality of a given argument but its legibility within a given disciplinary conversation.” To make your ideas legible to the reviewers in your chosen journal, Dr. Hannabach suggests a two-step process: 

Step 1: Identify legibility gaps in reviewer feedback  

Reviewer pushback on your theoretical commitments can mean two different things: sometimes reviewers understand your framework accurately and reject it on its merits; other times, what seems like disagreement is, at its core, a gap in understanding, as reviewers haven’t quite grasped your approach, its rigour, or its value. 

This legibility gap can manifest itself as reviews that describe your work as “unclear, under-theorized, or insufficiently engaged, even when that’s not actually the case,” advises Dr. Hannabach. If you encounter those three terms or language like them, read them as evidence of your reader’s distance from your approach.  

Similarly, you might look for comments that question whether your work has truly earned its conclusions: comments about how the methods used to support an empirical claim are non-standard, or about how your conclusions aren’t fully earned by the methods. In these cases, it may be that your framework contains an internal logic that you may not have realized you need to defend explicitly.  

When you see these kinds of comments, they open the opportunity for you to to make your framework more comprehensible to your reviewers. This kind of feedback can look like it is questioning the merits of your work, but, underneath, it reveals a gap in understanding — a gap that you can bridge.  

Step 2: Bridge the legibility gap explicitly 

Dr. Hannabach recommends stating, early and explicitly, how your framework engages with, extends, or challenges existing work. She often adapts the following template when introducing this material: “Adopting a Black Feminist framework helps scholars in [disciplinary field] to [do X, or answer questions about Y].” The key here is to frame your approach within the discipline’s concerns, showing them, in language they already use, what your approach lets them do that they couldn’t do before. 

Dr. Hannabach’s approach asks you to build a bridge, not to relocate your argument to the other side of it. Your theoretical commitments stay exactly where they are, but — by being explicit about disciplinary fit — you enable your reader to find their way to your argument.  

Building the bridge is its own kind of intellectual work: it asks you to think deeply about what your framework actually offers a field that doesn’t yet use it, and to articulate that connection in terms that help a skeptical reader to follow the reasoning. That thinking might sharpen your own sense of your contribution in the process. It also means that Dr. Hannabach’s template is only the topic sentence of a one- or two-paragraph section that makes Black Feminist theory legible to a field that hasn’t yet opened to it.  

It might be that your work needs more than one of these bridges, which in turn need different topic sentences: “A Black Feminist framework treats [X kind of evidence] as sufficient grounds for [Y kind of claim], because it holds that [statement about what the framework asserts about that evidence]” or “Where economics has traditionally explained [phenomenon] through [well-known theory or scholar], a Black Feminist framework offers [specific point of difference or extension], which changes [conclusion or question].” 

Of course, this two-step approach only works if you get past the editor and receive feedback from peer reviewers. I can’t tell you why you’re getting desk rejects: whether your work genuinely doesn’t fit with the journal, and you need to look for venues that have published work that runs against normative ways of thinking; whether your lit review doesn’t signal sufficient familiarity with the fundamentals of that journal’s field; or whether the whole field must collectively progress toward epistemic inclusion before you can get published in high-impact journals. 

I suppose, dear letter-writer, that two things can be true at once: you can build bridges across legibility gaps, and you should, because it will help you to get your work published and read by the people who need to read it, and because it will deepen and clarify your own understanding of how your work contributes to your field. At the same time, the fact that you’re the one who has to build this same bridge, again and again, is a systemic problem that a template topic sentence can’t fix. Epistemic inclusion won’t arrive because individual scholars keep patiently building individual bridges: it will arrive when reviewers with the majority viewpoint work to close the gap from their side. Until that change comes, following this advice will help you to make the best possible case for publication, and the work you publish is still yours, undiluted, and placed in front of the readers who need to see it. 

For more writing advice, see our full Ask Dr. Editor archive.