[Corpora-List] publishing lists of rejected and accepted papers

[Kim Witten]

Hi,
As an early student researcher, I can think of several justifications for why a published list of rejected papers could be detrimental and not-great, none of them having to do with my being "scared" (not to say that isn't a valid justification as well). These concern the public presentation of my work and my professional identity as an early researcher and a linguist. I don't want to ramble on, so I'll just say that getting rejections — whether it's paper submission rejections, abstract rejections, or negative presentation feedback, etc. — is one of the many ways I gain experience as I acquire social and pragmatic knowledge about the arena of publishing research and generally being a good academic. A persistent record of those rejections – available for the judgment of others, or perhaps as a reminder to myself of my "failures", or for the public display of my colleagues' "failures" – is not very conducive to creating the type of mutually-beneficial, academically-inspiring linguistic community we want, IMHO. 

Additionally, there are lots of rationales for why papers get rejected, some of them having to do with timing or goodness-of-fit for the publication. But regardless of the reason, I would hate to have rejected work out there in some marked form that preempts its successful presentation to the academic community. 

In sum, publishing rejections seems like a solution to a valid problem that actually creates a bigger, unintended set of problems. I don't see why it is necessary, given the drawbacks that it might entail.

Thanks for reading,
Kim
---
Kim Witten, PhD candidate 
Language & Linguistic Science 
University of York, UK
kaw522 at york.ac.uk