and so it begins

Journal articles are the currency in the academic job market (in my area at least). Three important things determine the 'richness' of your Curriculum Vita (fancy word we use for a resume).

1. The sheer number of your publications
2. The prestige of the journals you've been published in
3. The number of your publications where your name is listed first among the authors (psychologists usually publish in teams)

Today my adviser and I are submitting a manuscript for publication. It reports the results of an experiment that I thought would never, ever work. I pitched it to her as I was trying to demonstrate how this famous researcher was really, really wrong. I said something along the lines of, "That's stupid. If he's right, then this absurd thing should happen if we do this."

Well, we did "this," the "absurd" thing happened, and it turns out that he was totally right. I guess that's why he's famous, and I'm not.

Which brings me to my point. Although we think our findings are pretty important, so does everybody else (regarding their own findings). And so there's a screening process for every journal. An editor decides whether a manuscript is worthy of review or should be rejected before review. If he or she deems it worthy, it gets sent to two or three anonymous experts on the topic of the paper. They read it, criticize it, and make suggestions about how it could be explained or alternate ways the results could be interpreted. They also recommend whether it should be rejected outright, revised and resubmitted, or accepted without changes (extremely uncommon). The time from submission to publication (if accepted) can span more than a year.

My adviser thinks we've got a good shot at getting in a top-tier journal, so we're submitting to Psychological Science. It's one of the best journals for all of psychology research, not just social psychology research. Naturally, I'm confident that we'll be rejected immediately (they reject 85% of their submissions, the vast majority of which are from some the of the best researchers in the world), but the good news is that when we are, we can just re-submit to a less prestigious journal.