Why waiting for your first publication as an ECR and having a broken wrist have a lot in common

Discusses the many similarities between recovering from a broken wrist and waiting for your first publication

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Tue 7 Apr 2026 14:48)

Introduction

I published three single-authored articles in international journals before I submitted my PhD. The first two were accepted at the first journal I submitted them to. The third led to a “you really can’t write and better leave academia” type of review but was eventually published in another journal. The journals in question were very new, 2-5 years old when I submitted to them. So, none of these journals were seen as “top journals”. But at the time I was blissfully unaware about journal rankings. That awareness didn’t come until these rankings started to complicate my career progression (see: Inclusive academia (2): Inclusive research evaluation). But my early positive publishing experiences definitely built up my confidence.

Over the years, I have helped dozens of ECRs – PhD students, colleagues and mentees alike – to get their first papers published. However, as a result of my own positive early publishing experiences, empathizing with those worried their work would never get published didn’t come naturally to me. I understood their concerns, but I couldn’t really feel the often-existential angst that plagued them. So yes, I do plead guilty: as a senior academic I have told many ECRs not to worry so much, assuring them they would be alright in the end.

In the remainder of this white paper, I will explain why this doesn’t really work, dive into six other similarities between having a broken wrist and being an ECR waiting for your first paper, and explain where the analogy breaks down. For easy reference a table of contents can be found below. If you were unfortunate enough to break your wrist (or another body part) too, or if you are simply curious what it is like, you may also find my detailed reflections in Did you break your wrist too? helpful. 

Table of contents

Why “you will be alright” doesn’t work

Expectation management

Offer details, not generic assurances or brush-offs

Empower rather than create dependency

Key decision points are early

A roller-coaster ride with lots of ups and downs

See the positive: learn from the experience

Where the analogy breaks down

In sum

Why “you will be alright” doesn’t work

It wasn’t until I broke my wrist a year ago that I suddenly felt – at a visceral level – why “you will be alright” doesn’t quite work. Telling ECRs who are waiting for their first publication that you and others have succeeded, and that they just need to be patient, is not terribly helpful. It was like hearing medical professionals telling me that – despite all the alarming signs to the contrary – my wrist and hand would recover if only I just waited patiently.

The point is that you really don’t know if you will be alright, whether you are an ECR or someone who broke their wrist. Yes, you can read or hear hundreds of stories that say it will all be fine. You’ll even believe them the moment you read or hear them. But then, after a while the doubt creeps in again. What if you are different? What if you are that person whose academic career will never take off? What if you are that person who ends up never being able to use their hand properly again?

So, as a senior academic there really is not much use telling ECRs they will be fine and they shouldn’t worry. Telling them that you were worried too when you were younger – and it was completely unnecessary – won’t help much either. It might comfort them temporarily, but they will reason that academics, circumstances, and academic eras differ. And rightly so! Instead, why not ask them: is there anything I can do for you to make this agonizing wait easier to bear?

Reflecting on this analogy a bit more, I realized that there are many more similarities between being an ECR waiting for your first publication and having a broken wrist. I hope reading about these six similarities in my white paper below will make coping with these two tribulations a little easier for you. 

Expectation management

We know from the academic literature that managing expectations is crucial. Being prepared for the challenges ahead of us usually allows us to deal with adversity better. This is probably the most important communality between dealing with a broken wrist and waiting for your first publication.

Broken wrist: prepare for a year of revalidation after cast removal

When I broke my wrist – by tripping over a tree root and catching the fall with my right hand – I was completely unprepared for how long the process of “getting back to normal” would take. I didn’t know anyone who had broken a wrist, arm, shoulder, foot, knee or leg, and the medical professionals did nothing to prepare me for it either.

I was only prepared for the stage in the cast and maybe a few weeks in a splint after that. So, I was assuming I would be fine within 6 weeks, 8 weeks tops. The good thing is that this did help me get through the cast stage with reasonable cheerfulness (see above for a picture), seeing the practical problems (e.g. sleeping, eating, working, showering, getting dressed, combing my hair) as interesting new challenges.

The shock came when the cast was sawn off after 4 weeks; yes, they do use an electric saw and yes, it is quite scary. My wrist looked and felt like a limp, dying bird that needed to be cradled to prevent it from falling off. But still …, I thought I would be fine with another 6 weeks.

I am now nearly a year in, and still have regular pain around the ulnar bone, very stiff fingers, and the after-effects of a bone set at an angle and a median nerve compression (quite common with a broken wrist). I spend a good chunk of my day on red light therapy and exercises to manage this. But I can now use my wrist and fingers for typing, most gardening and cleaning jobs, and have accepted my remaining limitations. If you have a broken wrist yourself, you may find some of the details in this white paper (Did you break your wrist too?) helpful.

Looking back on the year, what was most frustrating is that nobody ever properly explained what caused my symptoms, let alone told me what I could expect in terms of recovery. Any concerns appeared to be completely ignored and brushed off with “it’s still early days, just be patient” (see also: Offer details, not generic assurances or brush-offs).

ECRs: prepare for (at least) a year in the submission process

As PhD student you know you need to finish your PhD and get your first paper(s) written up. But most recent PhD graduates are not prepared for the agonizingly long wait for the first decision on a paper submission or the grueling R&Rs. And at no part in this process are you certain the paper will be accepted. Yes, chances are higher the further you progress, but papers can still be rejected after three rounds; I even had one rejected in the fourth round quite recently.

(Note: the paper rejected in the 4th round got published in another journal. I like the final paper better than it would have been if it had been accepted for the other journal. The process also led to one of my best editorial experiences, both for the journal where it was rejected and for the journal it was accepted. You can read my thank-you to the two editors here. However, there is no way I would have been as equanimous about the 4-year journey if I had been an ECR).

When the publication process is extended beyond what we – as an academic publishing for the first time – feel is normal, we start to imagine all sorts of worst-case scenarios: they hate the paper, they hate me, they are discriminating against my topic/gender/ethnicity, etc., I will never make it as an academic.

What we don’t know, mainly because most of us have never been told, is that the process can take a very long time (see “round after round: will it ever end”). Whether or not our paper will be dealt with quickly is pretty much a random process, dependent on many factors that are unrelated to the author or the paper itself. I have had papers with decisions within 6 weeks – pretty much the minimum processing time unless you submit to predatory journals – and papers that took over a year to get a first decision.

There are even similarities between the time it takes to get a first decision on your paper and the time it takes being able to “sort of” use your hands for most purposes after breaking your wrist. Two to three months is possible if you are lucky, four to six months is quite common, seven to twelve months is not unusual, and there are cases where this takes more than a year. The whole process of getting to the final stage, a fully functioning wrist, and a published paper could easily take 2-3 years.

Offer details, not generic assurances or brush-offs

As a corollary of Expectation Management, medical professionals and senior academics could help by giving more information of what the recovery process or the paper publication process is likely to look like. For this to be effective, it requires specific information, not just generic assurances or brush-offs along the lines of “this is normal, you will just have to wait”.

Broken wrist: be honest about timelines and risks

It would have helped me tremendously if, early in the process, I had been able to talk to a doctor like the one I spoke to at my last appointment in the fracture clinic, 7 months after breaking my wrist. He was young, and thus likely less “jaded” than the other doctors I spoke to. He took time to explain to me in detail why the fact that my wrist had been set at an angle explained all my remaining symptoms. He also explained why it was unlikely I would ever recover my full range of movement (for experts, my wrist flexion is only 60%, meaning I cannot fully bend my wrist forward). The explanations didn’t take long, just 5 minutes, but it made all the difference. Even more importantly, I felt he treated me like an adult (see Don’t patronize).

In contrast, two weeks into my injury, the head of the clinic acknowledged the bone had been set at an angle but assured me that I would be very likely to get full movement back without an operation and that if I didn’t, I would be referred to a hand specialist. The alternative was an operation straight away to set the bone straight, but that would come with its own risks. So, I opted for “no operation”, reasoning that if I didn’t make enough progress with 4-6 weeks, I could see a hand specialist. But that didn’t happen for another seven months, and when it did, it was after significant median nerve compression had been established. Moreover, it only happened because I pushed, making a considerable effort to follow up referrals.

As a result, in the first seven months I gradually became more, not less anxious, as the recovery process didn’t seem to progress as I expected. If you are interested in further details, see my white paper Did you break your wrist too?.

ECRs: take time to explain the peer review process

As seniors we often tell ECRs they just have to be patient, relating our own stories about papers that were in the review process for years. Knowing they are not the only ones suffering from publication delays may help ECRs. But what would probably help more is sitting down with them explaining the realities of the peer review process, the role of editors and reviewers, and what you can and cannot expect from them. For ECRs the whole process of publishing can be very opaque; it is not something that is commonly discussed in PhD programmes. Below are some of the things you might want to bring up in this discussion. In addition, being specific about timelines also helps (see “a roller-coaster ride with ups and downs”).

Just like our grandmothers might be stunned to hear that we don’t get paid for publishing papers, ECRs might be surprised to learn that editors and reviewers do not get paid for their service. Worse, they usually don’t even get time to carry out their activities; they are expected to sacrifice their own research time to support others. Editors and reviewers thus contribute to what we call the “academic commons”. They spend precious time giving us feedback on our papers. They get few, if any, extrinsic rewards for doing so; even intrinsic rewards are few and far between.

Yes, being involved in editorial work might help demonstrate leadership in the discipline in your promotion application. But it typically doesn’t help as much as taking on a leadership role in your own university or publishing additional articles. So rather than complaining about editors and reviewers, try to see things from their perspective: most are simply doing the best they can under very difficult circumstance. Many reviewers and editors go over and beyond the call of duty and act as a “hidden supporting cast”.

Editorial roles have also become much more time-consuming and stressful over time. In the past 5-10 years the number of papers submitted to journals has increased dramatically. Whereas in the past some journals might only have had 200-300 submissions per year, these days many struggle with processing well over a thousand, some cope with substantially more. Imagine that: opening your email in the morning and finding another 3-5 articles to deal with, every day of the year.

So please don’t harass editors the moment your paper has been under review for a few months. Imagine if every one of the hundreds of authors who have papers in the system sent an editor emails asking about its progress, they wouldn’t have time for their proper editorial work! If you feel that your paper might have fallen between the cracks, contact the managing editor instead. This is typically a professional staff member who is either paid or given time to deal with the journal’s administration.

Asking the editor about the specifics of your paper journey is like asking an academic to do secretarial work. And yes, I know that most academics are doing secretarial work these days. But we all know how much we hate it and what a waste of time we think this is. So don’t saddle up the editor – who you would like to take a positive decision about your paper – with the same frustration.

With the increasing number of submissions also come more review requests for popular reviewers, i.e. reviewers who do a good job and submit their reviews on time. Before I retired from editorial boards, I often received multiple requests a week; one co-author told me she had once received 29 requests in a single week. It takes me nearly a day to complete a good review, so doing more than one or two reviews a month is clearly not possible on top of a normal workload.

Therefore, more and more academics are rejecting reviewer requests. It is not unusual for an editor to have to ask a dozen or more academics to find the preferred number of reviewers (usually two to four). Even then, one of them might take months – rather than the allocated 4-6 weeks – to complete their review, thus delaying the process. But at that stage it is too late to find another reviewer.

And before you ask: yes, for a whole host of reasons discussed in many articles and blogposts, our publishing system might well require a whole-sale reform. But until this happens, explaining the current logics of it to ECRs might help them being a bit less anxious about the process.

Don’t patronize patients and ECRs

As patients and ECRs alike, it helps if we feel we are spoken to as a slightly less informed equal, rather than as an idiot. In my broken wrist journey, only my private physiotherapist and the last doctor I spoke to did so. The other doctors didn’t exactly treat me like an idiot, but I felt they did treat me as an old and rather naïve woman. It might just me being sensitive about this – I was hitting 60 around the time of breaking my wrist – but I felt that as soon as they saw my age their attitude changed.

Yes, we might be patients, but as academics we are also fellow professionals (as they should know from the intake conversation). And as academics nearly all of us will have researched our condition, gathered data on our symptoms, and ran experiments with treatments. My most productive exchange with a medical professional (a GP) was a decade ago when – after giving him a complete rundown of my symptoms over the past weeks and the things I tried – he asked me: “Are you a medical professional yourself?”. When I said: “No, but I am a researcher and I know how gather data and analyze them”, he asked me “So, tell me, which tests am I going to run now?”. Of course, I knew the answer.

Even so, as senior academics we are often guilty of the same behavior. We should realise that ECRs are highly-educated professionals too. They might not know as much as we do, but they may well know more than we think.

So, whether dealing with patients or with ECRs it might be better to first find out what they already know. You can then build on that and – if necessary – clarify misunderstandings, rather than presume they are a blank slate and come up with lots of information they are either already familiar with or are not yet ready to hear. We often forget or neglect to do so as it does take more time; I certainly have. But it typically leads to a more productive interaction, and we might even learn something new ourselves!

Empower rather than create dependency

Related to our previous recommendation (Don’t patronize), it would help if both medical professionals and senior academics focused on empowerment rather than dependency. Patients and ECRs know their own circumstances best. So – with sufficient information and withing reason – they are in the best position to devise their own strategies to deal with the problems at hand.

Broken wrist: offer low hurdle advice on pain and symptom management

Most of the healthcare system is – possibly inadvertently – forcing patients into a state of dependency, a system of “doctor knows best” and “just do what the doctor says”. This may well work for some patients, and obviously I am not suggesting that patients should decide on complicated treatments. But when dealing with pain and symptom management, patients should be encouraged to play their part. Especially for academics – who are used to researching problems and solutions themselves – a prescriptive approach is unlikely to be effective.

To deal with fractures, it would help to provide some guidance on the many things that patients can do to help recovery. I understand that it is not cost-effective to have busy and highly-paid specialists answer individual questions or offer advice for pain and symptom management. But NHS physiotherapists do not appear to do this either; in any case their appointments are too infrequent to be of much use to the patient.

So, having something equivalent to a GP practice health care assistant in the fracture clinic addressing patients’ questions and concerns could improve recovery significantly. It would definitely reduce their anxiety. Barring this, even a simple leaflet would be better than nothing. Ultimately, this should reduce the costs of the health service by leading to healthier habits and more proactive health management. If you have broken your wrist too, you may find my own recommendations in Did you break your wrist too? useful. 

ECRs: offer resources that help finding answers independently

As senior academics we often go into “problem solving mode” when interacting with our junior colleagues. This is well-intended and our junior colleagues might be so anxious that they prefer a quick and easy answer. But it may not be the best way to ensure our ECR colleagues develop their own skills and resilience. So rather than find “the answer” for them, why not refer them to a range of useful resources – such as blogs, career guides, or journal webinars – that they can use to find their own answers. You could offer to have a conversation with them after they do, filling in any gaps, and answering any questions that arose.

My own blog is based on this premise. Whenever I receive a question from a mentee reflecting a wider concern, I simply write it up as a blogpost. That way I can refer other mentees to it, rather than having to reinvent the wheel every time. Most importantly it allows them to read and explore things at their own pace and come back with specific questions. Here are some multi-part blogpost series that may be useful for ECRs:

I also have a container page Working in academia that provides structured access to hundreds of blogposts and videos that may help ECRs to navigate the academic landscape. If books are more your thing I can recommend the following.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...		 August 2023:

Only £9.99...

Finally, at Positive Academia we have published three articles that may help you making sense of our academic world (see below).

  1. Sathish, C.; Harzing, A.W. (2025) Let’s form a Positive Academia Collective Transformation: Re-imagining our academic values and interactions, Management Learning, in press. Available online...- Publisher's version (free access) - Related blog post.
  2. Sathish, C.; Harzing, A.W. (2026) The Fables of the Academic Zoo: De‐Legitimizing Dominant Micro‐Practices Through Storytelling and Caring, Gender, Work, and Organizations,  33, no. 3, pp. 1117-1136. Available online...- Publisher's version (free to read) - Related blog post.
  3. Harzing, A.W.; Sathish, C. (2026) Every little action counts: How cognitive, affective, relational, and agentic (micro-)practices support academic micro-transformation, Management Learning, in press. Available online...- Publisher's version (free access) - Related blog post.

We also created two little booklets, available at cost-price from your local Amazon store. The first – Every Little Action counts – includes 52 weekly actions that help cultivate a more positive academic landscape. Each action is a small, reflective, and powerful step towards a supportive, collaborative and inclusive academic environment.

Our second booklet – The Fables of Academia – features 26 fables that support the de-legitimization of dominant norms, values, and practices in academia. Through the fables, familiar academic experiences are brought into perspective: authorship tensions and credit allocation, academic hierarchy and gatekeeping, mentoring and supervision dynamics, invisible labor and service work, belonging and exclusion in higher education, research culture and performance metrics, care, collaboration, and collective responsibility.

Key decision points are early

As for many things in life, key decision points are located early in the process and may make an enormous difference in the length of your journey and its eventual outcome.

Broken wrist: the first few weeks are crucial; think and ask questions

As you can read in my white paper Did you break your wrist too?, my bones were set through what is called “closed reduction”, i.e. without operation. A permanent cast was applied after three days. My hand was set at a slight angle from my wrist, possibly because it was hard to hold my hand at the correct angle when casting it; the armrest of the treatment chair was broken. I also believe that my median nerve compression might have resulted from the fact that the plastering doctor pinched just a little too hard and too long on my wrist to ensure a close fit of the cast.

As my bones were not ideally set, I was offered the choice of operating at my check-up meeting after one week. I declined as there is a non-negligible risk to operation, and the consultant indicated that I would probably recover my full range of motion with “conservative treatment”, i.e. cast and exercises.

Retrospectively, these early decision points set my route to only partial recovery. If I had known how crucial hand-arm alignment was, I would have insisted on waiting for a chair with a fully functioning arm-rest. If I had known how quickly muscles weaken with inactivity, I would have exercised even more whilst in the cast. If I had known how limiting the angled bone setting could be, I might even have decided to go for an operation after all. But it is hard to make these decisions if you don’t have the full picture (see also “Offer details, not generic assurances or brush-offs”) and are in a state of distress.

ECRs: the choice of journal is crucial, don’t rush it

For ECRs the key decision points are early in their journey too. They revolve around the choice of journal and the level of care in preparing the manuscript for submission. Unlike recovery from a broken wrist – which requires lots of hard graft from the start – there initially is very little you can after submitting to a journal. You just sit back and wait. But there is a lot you can do before submitting to a journal.

So, weigh up the options carefully, find a journal where your paper will really contribute to the conversation (see: Who do you want to talk to? Targeting journals [2/8]). This reduces the chance of your paper being desk-rejected as “not fitting the journal”, or worse going through the review process before the editor decides it is not a good fit.

After deciding which journal to go for, make sure you prepare the best paper you possibly can. Don’t just send off a paper because you are “fed up with it”. If you are fed up, just let it lie for a week instead and return to it then. If you don’t prepare the best possible paper, it may come back as quickly as a boomerang, especially if you are submitting to a top journal.

So, research your target journal carefully and then prepare the submission to align with it. You can find a lot of guidance on this in journal editorials and guidelines, but also in my “How to avoid a desk-reject” blogpost series and video series as well as my career guide on publishing in academic journals.

Should I stick to the chosen path or start the journey afresh?

As we discussed above, key decision points occur early the process. So, by the time you start to question them, you are usually well into your journey. This means that “giving up” can be costly. Yes, even after nearly a year I could theoretically still decide to go for an operation, but that would mean breaking the bones and starting the whole recovery journey again. The ultimate outcome might be better, but it might also be worse…

The same is true with journal submissions. If the submission process is slow and doesn’t seem to move forward, you may be tempted to “cut your losses”, withdraw the paper and start afresh in another journal. But that would mean starting an entirely new journey with all of its accompanying uncertainties.

It is hard to know whether to “stick with the devil you know” or go for a “clean slate”. That’s why investing upfront in the decision-making process is so crucial. But whatever you do, don’t be tempted to go for a quick solution by relying on medical quackery or predatory journals. The solution might be quick, but the ultimate result is likely to be unfavorable.

A roller-coaster ride with lots of ups and downs

Your journey to recovery from a broken wrist and your journey to your first publication as an ECR are both roller-coasters rides with a lot of ups and downs along the way.

Broken wrist: expectations crushed with every appointment

Looking back, my broken wrist recovery journey followed a predictable pattern of looking forward – often with considerable anticipation – to a particular stage in the process – usually appointments with medical professionals – and then seeing my expectations “crushed”.

It started with cast removal. After four weeks in the cast, I was really looking forward to having it taken off. At that stage I still naively believed this I was nearing the end of my recovery journey. My expectations came crashing down when I realized how incredibly weak my wrist was and how little movement I had in my fingers. If you have broken your wrist too and/or are interested in the rest of the roller-coaster ride, you can read it in my white paper Did you break your wrist too?.

Here, let me just note that every stage of the process took much longer than I expected. This was largely because medical professional didn’t give any indication of how long getting an appointment would take, saying vague things like “it may be a while” or “he is very busy”. My own estimates – that I thought were reasonable – were thus always disappointed.

The appointments themselves invariably left me feeling deflated. They mainly consisted of telling me – without any details (see: Offer details, not generic assurances or brush-offs) – to wait patiently for recovery or for an appointment with another medical professional.

ECRs: round after round after round after round, will it ever end?

Likewise the journey towards your first publication is a roller-coaster of highs and lows.

The first round

After the relief of finally submitting your paper, the first micro-moment of joy arrives when your paper has passed the stage of administrative review. At some journals your paper might come bouncing straight back if you haven’t strictly adhered to the often-idiosyncratic formatting requirements. Not a huge issue in itself, no. But having to for instance reformat your carefully prepared A4 lay-out to Letter size, use a different font, double-space your text, or move the tables and figures to the end, can put a slight damper on your feeling of accomplishment of finally having the damn thing submitted.

The first significant positive step in the publication process is the certainty that your paper has been deemed good enough to pass the desk-reject stage, a decision that may take anything from several days to 6 weeks. At least you are now in with a chance of getting expert feedback! However, this brief relief is fleeting and is quickly counteracted by getting stuck in the “reviewer selection” stage, which again may take anything from several days to 6 weeks. If it takes longer than 1-2 weeks, you start asking yourself: Is there something wrong with my manuscript? Why else would it take so long to find suitable reviewers? (The answer is usually no, it is just that the review process is overloaded, see: “ECRs: take time to explain the peer review process”)  

A big sigh of relief follows when a full contingent of reviewers has been selected, and your manuscript is now “awaiting reviewer scores”. But then – after checking for progress every week – you start wondering how long it can take for the reviewers to finish their assignment. They have 4 weeks to complete their reviews, but if you were chosen as a reviewer yourself you would surely complete such an important task within a week. So, shouldn’t the review scores be in by now? After a while you start checking every other day, then every day. But the reality is that reviewers often need to squeeze their reviewing work into the evening hours or weekends. And sometimes life just takes over. So, it might take much longer than four weeks. And there will almost always be one reviewer who is late, sometimes very late.

But then hurray, the manuscript is “awaiting editorial decision”, the reviewers have completed their work. Not long now and you’ll get the verdict; you get a sinking feeling in your stomach anticipating that it might be bad news. This stage usually takes a few days, maybe a week, editors have many other duties beyond writing your decision letter. But after a day you are already biting your nails. Sometimes this stage takes much longer, and your mind starts catastrophizing again. Surely this means it’s a rejection and the editor is putting off their difficult job of writing the letter? It might do, but usually it is simply because the editor is very busy, ill, or coping with some personal issues.

The decision letter arrives. You have a revise & resubmit. Your heart leaps with joy and pride. But then you read the dreaded sentence: your paper “requires major work” and “is a high-risk revision with no guarantee of eventual publication.” Talking about giving with one hand and taking back with another! If it is any solace, virtually every R&R decision letter I have received in the past 10 years was labeled a high-risk R&R. So don’t be too discouraged.

After the decision letter, you quickly scan the reviewers comments – which can stretch to more than a dozen pages – and your emotions range from happiness (when a reviewer comments on the good things in your paper or provides you with constructive, but doable suggestions) to irritation (why on earth didn’t they understand what you thought you had explained so clearly?), and from outright anger (how can they be so stupid to suggest an approach that is clearly wrong?) to despair (yes they are right about the flaws, and you are sure you can never fix them). Reading the reviewers comments on your paper is a roller-coaster all on its own.

The revision process

But after talking to your co-authors and/or colleagues you cool down a little. Reading the comments again, you start seeing why the reviewers misunderstood your argument and why their suggested approach isn’t so stupid after all.  So, you buckle down and revise the paper to the best of your ability. You even find a creative way to fix the flaws the reviewers identified. It is with a big sigh of relief that you submit a revised version. Surely you are done now?

Regrettably, no. Even if the reviewers are happy with your revision and the editor doesn’t reject your paper after the first revision, very few papers at good journals in Business & Management get accepted after only one round of reviews. In my nearly 100 published papers so far, I have experienced this only once or twice. Even then, it was a conditional accept. So, this process of revising & resubmitting can go on for quite a while. Two rounds is usually the minimum, three rounds quite common, and four rounds not unusual.

At every stage new concerns can arise. Sometimes a first revise & resubmit helps to clarify the author’s purpose, but then – when the reviewers really understand the paper – they see new flaws. Sometimes, one of the reviewers drops out, and a new reviewer is introduced who might bring up new concerns. So, you revise again, and again; every revision stage is a mini roller-coaster in itself.

But let’s assume that you are lucky and you get through two or three revisions within a reasonable amount of time rather than having to wait 6-9 months for a decision in each round. You now have that coveted letter that says the paper is (conditionally) accepted. Celebrate that achievement, because the process isn’t over quite yet…

Not quite there yet

Several things still need to happen before you can proudly show an officially printed version of your paper to your grandmother (who will promptly ask what you got paid for it and be baffled if you tell her “nothing”). First, one of the conditions for final acceptance might be that you cut down your paper as – in responding to reviewers’ demands – your word-count may have exploded. This may be hard, very hard.

It is well over 25 years ago, but I still remember my first paper for a top journal which – after several rounds of revisions – ended up weighing in at around 15,500 words. It was accepted on the condition that I cut it down to 7,500. I was in tears, how on earth was I supposed to do that? The paper was a test of a well-known typology, and I ended up focusing on the three “upstream” strategy elements only and cutting out the “downstream” management/HRM elements (control mechanisms and expatriation). But the latter were topics I was far more passionate about; they were the core of my PhD thesis. So, it almost felt like cutting off one my limbs. Rest assured, being asked to cut your paper in half is not common; usually you are required to shave off 10-20% and you will often find the paper improves through it. In my case, I simply made the longer version of my paper available on my website as a pre-publication print.

Second, you will need to manage the paper’s production process. This includes reviewing the proofs which frequently involves balancing the pride of seeing your article in print with frustration of seeing how badly the tables and figures are formatted. It might also mean the joy of discovering your paper will be eligible for free Open Access because your institution has an agreement with the publisher or the disappointment when it hasn’t.

You may also find the publisher denies you free Open Access despite your institution’s agreement because they classify your article as an opinion piece. This recently happened to our Fables of the Academic Zoo paper, a rigorous, heavily referenced 14,000-word theory piece that appeared in the Transcending Boundaries section of Gender, Work, and Organization, although the publisher ultimately compromised by making the article “free to read”.

[The Transcending Boundaries section has a slightly different review process: you submit a 500-word proposal first; if accepted you can submit a full paper. Your paper then has one round of blind peer review with two reviewers. Subsequently, the editor either rejects the paper or gives it a conditional accept or minor revisions. In our case we still made very significant revisions based on the reviewers’ comments as we wanted the paper to be the best it could be. But the slightly different review process meant that Wiley deemed it was not a regular research article.]

Even if you get through the production process without a scratch, another period of waiting starts. First, you need to wait for the article to appear in online first. This means the article is available online but isn’t assigned to a journal issue yet. Depending on the publisher and the journal this may be as quick as a week or as slow as 3-4 months.

Second, you need to wait until the article has been assigned to a journal issue and is “officially” published. For journals without a backlog this may happen as quickly as 3-6 months, but a year is far more common. Many of the top journals have a two-year backlog and some articles need to wait nearly three years for allocation to an issue. So, the rollercoaster ride from first submission to seeing your article in print may well take 4-5 years.

Technological changes: the downside and upside

The ups and downs you experience in the first round of the publishing process are largely due to the introduction of online submission systems. This leads many of us – and especially ECRs – to constantly check the status of our manuscript in the online system. Whilst it may seem helpful to know about your manuscript’s status, I argue this information often creates more anxiety than certainty. There is such a thing as too much information!

This is especially true as status labels in the online system might not always be correct. I was getting really worried about the faith of one of my last articles, even though it ultimately ended up being accepted within the record time of 7-8 months and only two rounds of revision. After three months the system still said: “waiting for reviewer assignment” rather than “waiting for reviewer scores”. Hence, I thought nobody wanted to review our article and it was doomed. But it turned out the system didn’t automatically update this notice once reviewers had been selected, and the managing editor had simply forgotten to adjust it. In fact, at that stage one of the reviews was already in and the other review and decision letter followed quickly.

So, my recommendation would be to submit your article and then try to forget all about it for at least 3-4 months. Granted, even with the “submit and forget about it” strategy, you would still worry about the outcome, but you wouldn’t worry about every single step. This is effectively what happened in the “good old days” when online submission systems didn’t exist yet  and manuscripts were submitted by email or even by snail mail. Review requests were sometimes sent out by snail mail too. Up till the mid 2000s, I received many review requests in  Australia that had taken 4-6 weeks to arrive as international mail was so slow. Imagine the delay if I had declined the review request.

The upside of technological change is that we now have our articles available online in “online first”, “early view”, “early cite”, or “ahead of print”. In the past, you just had to wait until the paper was published in print, which as we saw above might take up to 2.5 years. Until that time your paper didn’t really exist. For some of us that included not receiving acknowledgement from our employer in the form of research hours, merit pay, or promotion.

Younger academics now seem to equate online first with publication. This makes perfect sense as articles can be read, used, and cited the moment they are online. I hope it will be only a matter of time before publishers switch to a system where journal issues are superfluous, every manuscript simply gets a DOI, and “online first” is the only publication date. This would also reduce problems in accurately tracking citations and bibliometric analyses.

See the positive: learn from the experience

Even if your experience doesn’t end positively (a fully healed wrist or a published paper), trying to see the positive side and learning as much as you can from the experience may help you to cope with the inevitable disappointment.

Broken wrist: knowing the drill and knowing how to manage

My wrist is unlikely to ever get fully back to normal. But I learned a lot from visiting A&E twice within the space of a month with urgent and painful, but not life-threatening, medical issues. It provided me with the reassurance of knowing what the process would be like if I ever needed it for more serious medical issues.

Moreover, even though my experiences weren’t entirely positive, the NHS isn’t nearly as bad as I thought based on what I had read in the media. I also came away with a profound appreciation of the importance of public health care, not simply because it is free, but because it brings everyone in society – across genders, ages,  classes, ethnicities, and nationalities – together around something that makes us all human: the fallibility of our own body.

Breaking my wrist also helped me to discover new skills and establish healthy routines. When my hand was in a cast, I finally learned how to use Word’s dictation feature. I also found I could train my left hand to do the tasks I normally do with my right hand. I won’t say I am fully  ambidextrous, but I can manage most things with my left hand now. Finally, my exercise routine for my wrist and fingers has now been extended to general stretching and strength exercises, which will no doubt help me to manage the inevitable process of aging joints and muscles.

ECRs: gather journal intelligence and writing material

Even if you don’t get your paper accepted at your preferred journal, you will still know more about the journal submission process than you did before. You have also started to slowly build up your knowledge base of journal outlets, a knowledge base that you will keep adding to during the coming decades. Soon you will be that person who tells an ECR colleague “this paper looks like an [journal name] article, I suggest you send it there”.

If, like many of us, you are unlucky enough to get your article rejected at a number of journals this learning process is speeded up. It may even lead you to write up some reflections about the experience to help others. This means that you may soon have your first publication: a blogpost or LinkedIn article. It may not be as prestigious as a journal article, but it might well reach a wider range of readers and be more impactful.

My co-author and fellow CYGNA member, Heejin Kim, did exactly that in her blogpost: Rejection, withdrawal, and acceptance: A story about message-journal fit. She also wrote an excellent post on the paper development journey for her first international journal publication in: From little seed to fully-grown tree: a paper development journey

Where the analogy breaks down

Every analogy has its limitations, and we shouldn’t take it too far. There are many ways in which having a broken wrist (or any other medical condition) and being an ECR are different. Here are three that readily occurred to me, but you may be able to think of many more. Drop me an email if you do please.

Level of personal experience with “the condition” differs

Medical professionals are experts in treating the condition in question. But most haven’t personally experienced the illnesses they are treating. Sure, they have lots of “second-hand” experience through the many patients they treat. They may even have been motivated to specialize in a particular illness because someone close to them suffered from it. Some may even have had a broken wrist themselves. But that is the exception, not the rule.

In contrast, every academic has gone through the experience of publishing for the first time. Senior research-active academics will have gone through the process zillions of times. Even in the Social Sciences where one to three publications a year is the norm; a senior academic will have clocked up hundreds of submissions. Remember, many articles need to go through 2-4 revisions, and many articles are not published in the first journal they are submitted to. In addition, many academics have also experienced “the other side”, i.e. they have been editors themselves and thus know the editorial process very well.

On average, senior academics are thus more likely to have direct personal experience with “the condition” than medical professionals do. They are thus more likely to be able to empathize with the specifics.

Employment conditions differ

Medical professionals are paid, not always as much as they deserve, but they are paid; editors and reviewers usually do not receive any renumeration. Medical professionals are also getting time to do the work they do. Granted, there is never enough time and they work long hours, but they do get time.

Most editors and reviewers do their work “on top of” their normal day job. Hence, although we should be appreciative and respectful towards both groups of professionals, I argue this is even more essential when interacting with editors and reviewers. They don’t have to contribute to the academic commons; they are working for the greater good.

Inoculation

Inoculation involves deliberately infecting someone with a small amount of the disease to trigger an immune response. This doesn’t really work that well for fractures. Breaking your wrist “a little bit” is not an option, though arguably a benign break might make you more careful in avoiding falls in the future.

Despite its sometimes-pathological elements, I would not like to portray publishing as a disease. However, inoculation does apply here in the sense that publishing “something small” early on in your career may help you avoid excessive worrying. This could be a book chapter, a publication in a minor journal, or even a book review. Anything that gives you some experience of what the academic publishing process is like, and that gets your name in print. Having something in print, however minor, is reassuring, it gives you an academic identity and an understanding of the publishing process.

In sum

We shouldn’t take the analogy too far. However, there are many similarities between breaking your wrist and waiting for your first publication as an ECR. General assurance that “you’ll be alright” won’t work in either case, and for both it is important to manage your expectations from the start. Medical professional and senior academics can help by providing specific information and empowering the patient or ECR to find their own ways of managing the process. Key decision-points lie early in the recovery or publication process and the whole journey is a roller-coaster ride with lots of ups and downs. However, even if the outcome is not fully positive, you may be able to take away some important learning from the experience.

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Copyright © 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Tue 7 Apr 2026 14:48

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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