Chapter 2 If at first you don’t succeed…
Tim M. Blackburn
Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
and
Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent’s Park, London NW1 4RY, UK.
2.1 Dukkha
It’s common knowledge that to be an artist is to choose a life of rejection. The struggling genius, unrecognised in their lifetime but venerated after their death, is something of a cliché, albeit a source of hope for all those artists whose careers are yet to take off. It was shock for me to discover that a career in science does not inure against rejection. It’s part of life for a scientist too.
This realisation began to dawn during my D.Phil. More than 30 years on, I can still clearly recall the devastation I felt at the reviews of my first ever submitted manuscript. I can equally clearly remember the response of my supervisor, Paul Harvey – that the comments were actually quite positive, and that the revisions would be followed by acceptance (he was right: Blackburn, Harvey & Pagel, 1990). With hindsight, my initial dejection was probably driven less by the comments themselves, and more by the process I’d gone through to get the manuscript to submission. I’d struggled with the concepts that the work was addressing. Getting my head around the statistical concepts needed to test those hypotheses was even harder. I’m totally indebted to the incredible patience with which one of the post-docs in the group, (now Professor) Mark Pagel, tried repeatedly to explain them to me. Then, my first draft of the manuscript Introduction came back from Paul with more red pen than printer ink. Yet after all that suffering – which had actually brought me to the point of applying for other jobs – the criticism was not over. This period defined the steepest learning curve of my career. That I managed to scale it was due in large part to the support that I had from Mark, Paul, and other colleagues and friends in that department.
As it goes, I escaped from my doctorate very lightly in terms of outright rejection. I managed to publish all of my thesis chapters, with relatively little drama. Despite the teething troubles I experienced during the genesis of Blackburn et al. (1990), that rapidly came to seem like a halcyon period. It was during my time as a postdoc, spanning the 1990s, that the reality of being a scientist started to bite.
2.2 Samudāya
At this point in my career, most of my work was part of “what turned out to be one of the most impressive collaborations in macroecological research” with Kevin Gaston, a brilliant scientist, but more, a stalwart friend at a difficult time. Macroecology was still a fledgling field in the 1990s, and one I think it’s fair to say that Kevin and I helped to develop. At the time, though, that development seemed like an uphill struggle. There was an element in the ecological mainstream that disliked the macroecological approach – or at least, an element in our reviewers. We were criticised for being focused on the documentation and post-hoc explanation of patterns, rather than hypothesis testing, and for addressing phenomena expressed largely at a scale that meant it was unamenable to the scientific gold standard of manipulative experiments. The criticisms were not wrong as such, but equally were not problematic for an approach to ecology that took a broad-scale and comparative perspective. Our manuscripts were nevertheless rejected. A lot. Looking back, it felt like rejection was the norm for anything we tried to publish that decade.
Without Kevin’s support – and that of another mentor, (now Sir) John Lawton – it would have been easy to lose heart. It got to the point where we felt compelled to address the critics head on, and in print. Kevin and I were invited to write a Minireview for Oikos as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations for the Nordic Ecological Society, and our contribution was ‘A Critique for Macroecology’ (Gaston & Blackburn, 1999), a push-back against “those” reviewers. The format gave us the freedom to express our opinions on where we thought the “barrage of criticism” of the field was justified, and where it was not. I don’t know if the paper changed any minds, but it felt cathartic. Its mere existence is tangible evidence of the pain of rejection. For me, it was also (along with Gaston & Blackburn, 2000) more or less a parting shot from that body of my research. It felt like time to move on.
The new millennium brought with it a new research focus, and new collaborators. I’d met Richard Duncan when he looked me up on a visit from New Zealand to the U.K. to measure museum specimens, and we’d immediately hit it off. We started to work on bird extinctions and alien invasions, applying macroecological approaches to understand drivers of species loss and gain. Through him I met another New Zealander, Phill Cassey (you can read Phill’s own reflections to find out exactly how), and the two of us forged a close relationship with another invasion biologist, Julie Lockwood, through an National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) working group that she’d organised. It was an exciting, productive, and fun period for me, and forged lifelong friendships. But even then, the pain of rejection had not disappeared. My manuscripts were still typically getting bounced. I’m sorry to say I let the bitterness of my own experience of reviewers set the tone of my reviews of others.
I knew well, back then, that Phill Cassey had also had a difficult time with reviewers – and not just me. It got us wondering – were we special, or did everyone share our pain? We decided to find out.
We sent out a short questionnaire to more than 150 of the world’s most published ecologists. It asked for information on how many of their manuscripts in the 1990s had been rejected, and why, and for details of their current position and publication career. Of the sixty-one ecologists who responded, only one claimed not to have had a manuscript rejected in this period. The more papers a scientist published, the more often they experienced rejection. Full professors got rejected more often than other tenured researchers. Essentially, rejection happens to everyone, but it doesn’t seem to be a barrier to productivity, or to success (Cassey & Blackburn, 2003, 2004). More catharsis. It didn’t make the pain of rejection any less, but at least we knew we weren’t suffering alone.
2.3 Nirvana
The most memorable example of rejection in my career happened around the time Phill and I were working on these rejection studies. We’d assembled a dataset that combined information on alien mammal species established on oceanic islands around the world with information on the number of native bird species that had gone extinct from those same islands. Our analyses were exciting. We could show that the number of extinctions was related to three variables: island area, maximum elevation on the island, and the number of alien mammal predator species. The effect of predators was greater on endemic birds – exactly those we expect to be more naïve to their impacts. Surely evidence that bird extinction probability was related to alien predator richness was tabloid-worthy. We wrote up the manuscript and submitted to Nature. We quickly got some good news – they’d sent it out for review!
The reviewers recommended rejection.
The main criticism of our analysis was that our data included extinctions that were prehistoric (albeit post colonisation by humans), while most alien mammal predators were introduced following the discovery of the islands by Europeans. Fair enough – we needed to dig into faunal changes pre- and post-European arrival. We re-ran the analyses using only historic extinctions and introductions: the results held. We rewrote the manuscript focussing on the historic era, reformatted it, and sent it to Science. We quickly got some good news – they’d sent it out for review!
The reviewers recommended rejection.
The main criticism of our analysis was that it did not consider prehistoric extinctions. I suspect that our howls could be heard in the next county.
I still have a copy of the letter I wrote back to the editors at Science. It’s long, but here’s a sample:
“the basis of review 1 [It’s not always Reviewer 2] is a single argument: that our results are a function of a failure to address pre-historic extinctions and introductions. Yet, this is a criticism that we specifically and explicitly refuted in the Supplementary Material, where we noted that “A significant effect of predator species number is still observed if the analysis is expanded to include pre-historic mammal introductions and bird extinctions” (Materials and Methods, paragraph 2). Indeed, our results are supported by analysing pre-historic and historic data together.”
Our sense of injustice was magnified because not ony was the criticism unjustified, but we had also actually included the relevant information in our original submission.
To Science’s credit, they were sympathetic to the arguments in my strop, and sent our manuscript out for adjudication. Reviewer 3 was positive. So were the editors. We were in (Blackburn et al., 2004)!
FIGURE 2.1: Taking time out from science during the Society for Conservation Biology conference in Brasilia, 2005. The author (left), with sometime co-authors Richard Gregory (second left), John Ewen (third right) and Phill Cassey (right). One of these people is not really a birdwatcher. Photo credit: Rebecca Boulton.
2.4 Magga
Doing science is not easy. It requires creativity. It requires hard and often tedious work. The end product is a manuscript (hopefully to become a published paper) that the scientist believes contains a true description of some small part of nature. It’s difficult then to be told that your truth is wrong. It’s worse if it’s considered so wrong that your manuscript is not worth publishing. Potentially, it’s years of hard grind down the pan. I’ve had 30 years of experience of this process now. It has at least taught me a few things.
First off, I’m not alone. Everyone gets manuscripts rejected. If you haven’t, you will. This knowledge doesn’t necessarily stop the pain of rejection, but at least your colleagues will understand.
Second, you don’t have to take rejection lying down. Sometimes the reviewers are just wrong. That maybe because you didn’t do a great job of explaining your position, but it might also be because they didn’t bother to read the supplementary material. I’ve argued a lot of tosses in my time. To those editors: sorry not sorry.
Third, don’t let the bitterness infect your treatment of others. For this, I am sorry. With hindsight, issues that seemed huge at the time are barely even memorable. I had lots of manuscripts rejected, but only a handful of specific examples still rankle. All of those manuscripts eventually got published.
Finally, what really matters is the support, partnership and friendship that you get from and give to your colleagues. Science is a human endeavour, and increasingly a team game. It’s hard, but it can be fun. A lot of the enjoyment comes from the others in your team. I’ve been lucky to have met and worked with better people than myself. I hope I’m a better person because of them. Be generous, but work with people you enjoy working with. They will help you through the pain.