Today I’ve received one of those blind peer reviewer reports which tells me how useless I am and how totally sub-standard my work is because… I mean, so many things that, really, I wonder that I’ve published anything at all. What the reviewers don’t know is that I no longer need to publish any more papers in any academic journal because the Ministry has already validated five of my assessment exercises (sexenios), and the rules of my university do not require that I validate the sixth, final one to keep my reduced teaching workload. I just want to complete my score and go for the sixth sexenio (in 2029), though I might finally just skip it. We’ll see.
As for the article, well, I got the rejection message by 14:00 and thirty minutes later I had already archived it in the digital repository of my university, to be made available in about 24 hours. I have added a note about how to cite it and, voilà, ready for circulation. That’s the rule I’ve been applying for a while, after learning that a rejected article is rarely accepted elsewhere because it always needs to be modified one way or another to meet specific journal requirements. I upload my rejects as self-published papers, poor things, and move on. Of course, matters would be very different if I had to get an accreditation, grant or similar, but I’m already past that videogame screen. I aim at filling the internet with my rejected ‘trash’ and see what survives.
I must conclude that I’m a rogue scholar, for I really don’t care much for the kind of articles we write today in Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. I’m not as irresponsible as to allow my PhD tutorees to disregard the required standards, since they are junior scholars and need to go through all the steps of the academic game. I am, however, truly fed-up with the haughty tone of most peer reviewers and with the expectation that all articles must fill the same rigid mould. Where are the rules published? Show me!
I’m also discovering that many reviewers are very poor readers. Many are lost without the pointers provided by the theoretical framework and can’t identify a thesis statement or a line of argumentation if it bites them. I also notice great difficulties to distinguish critical/analytical commentary based on close reading from plot summary. My job, as I understand it, is to illuminate (fictional) texts and explain how they are constructed on the basis of how the plot, the narrative and the context intertwine. I refuse to use somebody else’s theorization in philosophy, sociology or whatever to pretend that this makes literary analysis more scientific. But this is the fashion these days, and I’m as stubborn as a stubborn mule. Hence, my growing pile of rejections.
I was trained to frame my research within the work done by the predecessors who had studied the same text, not to bring in alien comment, and my standards as a peer reviewer go in that direction. In my most recent peer review I was asked to assess an article about a novel I know very well. The article in question read this novel from an angle that, while appropriate, did not really contribute anything substantial because the bibliography didn’t include a single article or book chapter dealing with said novel (and there are quite a few). I strongly objected to that omission, as it seems to me that any new reading of a work needs to interact with the already existing ones. Otherwise, the reading tends to repeat the basics and marvel that a wheel is round.
This article bounced back for a second round of reviewing, and I found that the author had included, as I requested, two or three secondary sources directly dealing with the novel. The problem is that they felt force-fed into a text that didn’t really have any use for them. The copy of the article I was given was already set for publication, it was no longer a basic Word manuscript, and I felt that I had little to say at that point, except ‘throw the whole thing away and start again’. So, as far as I’m concerned, my peer reviewing was good for nothing and that article will soon be published. The theoretical framework, oh yes, was very solid as they usually are, but what the author had to say about the novel was, let’s say it, underresearched and irrelevant, though they won’t know this from my report. I’m considering, however, never participating again in the circus that peer reviewing has become if my opinion will count for so little.
Now, let me explain the crucial difference between a peer reviewer and an editor. I’ll begin with the latter. I’m co-editor of the academic online journal Hélice and I have edited quite a number of monographic issues in academic journals, collective books and e-books with students’ work. An editor works to make a text better, applying a positive, constructive attitude towards the author’s work. As editor, it’s my job to shepherd the author towards the ultimate goal: the publication of a solid piece of academic writing that, regardless of the theoretical standpoint chosen, illuminates a text for the benefit of other readers.
Editors, as professional writers know, (mostly) love authors and work generously to improve writing and argumentation, and to make texts presentable and, above all, readable. In contrast, peer reviewers (mostly) dislike authors because a) they don’t know them; b) paper reviewing takes time away from other more pleasant tasks; c) a blind peer review does not benefit the reviewer in any way. Editors, in contrast, take pride in what they do. We know the authors in our ‘team’, we love our task and it makes us proud to publish the result of our efforts with our name attached to them.
Peer reviewers lurk in the shadows of anonymity. Editors bring light into the hard task of coordinating a journal issue or a collective volume. Peer reviewers are inquisitional, judgemental and often rather nasty because that has no consequences. Editors, in contrast, are unselfishly generous because they have a relationship to maintain with the authors, which may even be of friendship. Being nasty to strangers is easy, being nasty to authors you know and respect is totally out of the question. This is why when a peer reviewer insisted that my co-editor and I eliminated one chapter from the last book I have published, we both dug in our heels and kept the chapter. The reviewer didn’t know our author at all, but we had been working with them closely for two years and one person’s anonymous criticism was not going to spoil our work as editors.
For me, trying to pass blind peer reviewing has become a truly masochistic exercise. Every time I send an article for review, I do so convinced that this time I’ve got it right and my work will be accepted. Then I get the same reports again and again. This might indicate that I need to alter my methodology. Yet, the same methodology seems fine to the journals who have accepted my work for publication. I must conclude, then, that the fault does not lie in my approach but in the lack of consensus among reviewers for, I insist, there is no publicly available set of rules to determine what makes an article worth publishing. Each journal has its own sets of questions to guide reviewers, but, for instance, this time I was criticized for briefly quoting from some authors or simply referencing them, when this is standard usage. You interact in depth with some sources, but others are there to provide context, background, or support for a minor point. We work by imitation, and I see many other authors using quotations in that sense, so why should I be criticized for that? Where is, I insist, the rule book?
When working on book chapters, matters are very different because we work with an editor and on the basis of a proposal. The last book chapter I have published is “The Posthuman Patriarchal Villain as Absolute Military Threat: Winston Duarte in The Expanse Novel Series” for the volume Wars We Never Fought: Armed Conflict in Speculative Fiction, edited by Matthew B. Hill and Leigha H. McReynolds (Bloomsbury, 2025. 177-193). This is an article I’m very proud of because Matt, whom I have never met, did a great job of improving my first draft, for which I’m very grateful. He showed appreciation for my work from the beginning, which helped me to gain confidence and see that the changes he proposed, mainly aimed at clarifying and strengthening my argumentation, were always constructive. I don’t know if this is true, but both Matt and Leigha claimed to have enjoyed my chapter, and that matters to me very much. We all need a friendly slap on the back to go on, not the furious anonymous attacks from blind peer reviewers. I’m puzzled, I insist, because I wrote the chapter I’ve mentioned with the same methodology and earnestness as the rejected paper. I’m the same person, why would I want to write trash one day and a good article the next one?
I’ve already come across the criticism that it’s ‘easier’ to publish books or book chapters than articles in journals because peer reviewing is non-existent or less demanding in the former. For me, it’s a matter of perspective. Books are peer reviewed at the proposal stage and before publication, and I find that at this latter stage reviewers are hardly in a position to ask the publishers to throw a book under contract into the bin basket. It may have happened, but not that I know of. A person who writes a book has made a mighty effort and, in my experience, reviewers usually give the go ahead, with few changes. With collective books, as noted, it’s in the interest of the editor(s) to make sure that all chapters are solid. In journals, to be honest, I’m not sure what the function of the editor is, beyond coordinating peer reviewing. When I get rejection messages, the editor never tells me ‘I agree with the reviewers’ or ‘despite the reviews, I want to publish your article’. Once, when I got a very unfair negative report and I complained about its unnecessary cruelty, the editor cooly pointed out that the reviewer was a very much respected scholar. That journal editor was on the reviewer’s side, which will never happen in an edited book.
I have three other articles ‘doing the rounds’, as I say, and I’m bracing myself for yet another batch of rejections. This, of course, won’t stop me from publishing my work online (watch me!), much more so seeing how anyway the internet is flooded with papers from open-access journals with a cavalier attitude not just to peer reviewing but to basic proofreading (you all know what I mean). As for writing more articles, we’ll see. After (almost) 35 years as an academic, I don’t feel much inclined to subject myself to so much masochism, and have no enticement to do so (beyond the sexenio…). We’re usually praised for the quantity, rather than the quality of our articles, and while I’ve been congratulated on my books, nobody has ever congratulated me on one of my journal articles.
Ok, that’s enough venting. I have a book to edit…