Your first publication - A roller-coaster ride with lots of ups and downs

Takes you - step by step - through the emotional journey of getting your first publication published

Anne-Wil Harzing - Wed 23 Sep 2026 07:24 (updated Tue 4 Aug 2026 13:18)

The journey towards your first publication can be a roller-coaster of highs and lows. In this blogpost I focus mainly on the emotions elicited in the process. If you are looking for guidance on writing, please see: Publishing in academic journals and Avoid a desk-reject for your article.

The first round - getting past the desk-reject

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”).

Round two - the nailbiting wait for the reviews

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…

Acceptance - No you are 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 happened to our Fables of the Academic Zoo paper (see above), a rigorous, heavily referenced 14,000-word theory piece that appeared in the Transcending Boundaries section of Gender, Work & Organization.

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.

The burning question: are rejections the norm?

Well... as always that depends. It depends on the discipline and the journals you submit too. But if - like me - you work in Business & Management and submit to highly ranked journals, it definitely is the norm. You all know the real estate adage: Location, location, location. In academia we have our own adage: rejection, rejection, rejection.

It happens to *all* of us: PhD students, ECRs, mid-career academics, full professors, research stars, and yes even to editors themselves. The problem is: many academics (and more importantly Deans) have no idea how hard it is to get a paper accepted these days. To give you an idea, here is a honest overview of the fate of my papers in a three year period.

Out of my four papers for top journals in the 2022-2024 period, only one had a smooth journey: accepted at the first journal we submitted to within 1.5 year. But that was after a full year of *very* rigorous preps and countless drafts by a perfect team of three (and data collection by the first author that had started seven years earlier).

The other three?
➡️ One ended up in a second-tier journal after three revisions and two earlier desk-rejects at two first-tier journals.
➡️ One ended up in a first-tier journal after three revisions and being rejected after the first round of revisions in two journals in another sub-field.
➡️ One ended up in a first tier journal after two revisions. Before that it had been rejected after the first revision in one journal and the *third* revision in another, both in another sub-field.

Between first conception and publication of all three of these papers were 3-5 years of rewrite after rewrite, reframing after reframing. And 3-5 years of doubt and wondering whether to give up altogether.

Oh... and there were four more projects
➡️ One ended up in a "bridge" journal after two attempts at mid-level academic journals
➡️ One ended up as a newspaper piece after desk-rejects for two essay proposals and two practitioner journal proposals.
➡️ Two minor projects were aborted altogether; by the time we got to the 3rd or 4th desk-reject the data were really too old to get published.

And yet... I don't regret working on any of these pieces! Why? Because for every single one of them I worked with a different, but equally inspiring team of academic colleagues. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing interactions and intellectual conversations with them. But I also enjoyed getting to know them all a little better on a personal level. Being able to work with inspiring people is a privilege that not many employees have. So as academics, let's make the most of it and enjoy - as much as we can - the research and writing as a process, rather than just focus on the (uncertain) outcome.

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