This is a new record. I had three papers rejected in a week.
I was wondering whether I should make this public. In academia, some researchers write a “CV of failures”1 As far as I understand, the reason for writing and publicizing such a CV is to help others deal with their “failures” by making them think that failures are normal and they are not the only ones that failed. I think I first learned this idea when Prof. Johannes Haushofer’s CV of failure went viral in 2016. Since then it caught my attention, and I have been reading CV of failures of researchers in my field. Reading those has helped me to some extent, so I considered sharing my own failures too. But then I hesitated. Publicizing failure can be inspiring—but only if the person is already seen as successful. I don’t have a good normal CV, so saying that I failed may just give the impression that I’m dumb (which I don’t disagree), and may not be inspiring at all.
However, at the end, I thought I should be positive and just make this public. First of all, one cannot have three papers rejected, if one doesn’t submit three papers. So, making this public actually reveals that I’m doing some work even if it hasn’t made it into my formal CV yet. Moreover, whether this blog post becomes inspiring is up to me. If I manage to also have some success in the future, then this may become something valuable. I think all the three papers we submitted are quite decent and they will be published somewhere in the future.
Also known as “Resume of failure”, “list of failure” etc.↩︎