Rejected paper - mention or not?

[nervosigeneris]

If you submitted a first author journal paper (with PI support) which was accepted for peer review but then rejected, is it worth mentioning in the application - i.e. talking about the learning experience as part of the research activity description? Or would it be perceived negatively?

Thanks!

@Goro @gyngyn @Catalystik @LizzyM

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[CardiologyPrincess]

They look for honesty. I wouldn't include it.

 

[IslandStyle808]

I wouldn't include it. You want all your positive upfront with your application.

 

[Leonard1993]

Why would you? C'mon man.

 

[Goro]

A rejected paper is the same thing as no paper. It's pointless to mention.

If you submitted a first author journal paper (with PI support) which was accepted for peer review but then rejected, is it worth mentioning in the application - i.e. talking about the learning experience as part of the research activity description? Or would it be perceived negatively?

Thanks!

@Goro @gyngyn @Catalystik @LizzyM

 

[Catalystik]

If you submitted a first author journal paper (with PI support) which was accepted for peer review but then rejected, is it worth mentioning in the application - i.e. talking about the learning experience as part of the research activity description? Or would it be perceived negatively?

Thanks!

@Goro @gyngyn @Catalystik @LizzyM

How you handle failure and What you learned from it/What would you do differently is the theme for many Secondary essays. A thoughtful response can turn this situation into something that will work in your favor.

I wouldn't include it in the Research activity description.

 

[WingedOx]

I have found that there is a home for almost every paper.

ain't that the truth...

 

[Law2Doc]

Don't mention a rejected paper. Under research experience you can certainly mention having worked in X lab doing research on the topic of Y (without mentioning the paper).

Also agree with Tired -- there's probably some crappy journal someplace that would publish it. There are even "open journals" out there where for a fee the journal would "publish" it on their website, and you could cite it on your CV. But bear in mind that this would have very little clout with anyone who does real research -- to them it's all about journal "impact factor".

 

[Catalystik]

I have found that there is a home for almost every paper.

One of my favorites is The Journal of Irreproducible Results
found at: http://www.jir.com/ (and yes, it's real).

 

[Law2Doc]

...
It's not like your only two journal choices are NEJM and then the journal of crap...

I didn't mean to imply this. I was just trying to echo the point that even if it is less than top journal quality, theres probably a home for it (for free or fee). But I would again stress that if you are applying to a research heavy place and a Adcom member that does much research, the journal name/ impact factor might dictate whether this gives you a boost or is a waste of a line on the CV beyond "did a little research".

 

[GrapesofRath]

Don't mention a rejected paper. Under research experience you can certainly mention having worked in X lab doing research on the topic of Y (without mentioning the paper).

Also agree with Tired -- there's probably some crappy journal someplace that would publish it. There are even "open journals" out there where for a fee the journal would "publish" it on their website, and you could cite it on your CV. But bear in mind that this would have very little clout with anyone who does real research -- to them it's all about journal "impact factor".

Remember we're talking about the undergrad level here and at that MD not even MD/PhD. Look getting published in a top journal in undergrad is a great thing for any resume. But it's definitely in the OPs interest for the sake of medical school applications where the standard is to show you understand what you did and if you can publish it anywhere to validate that you did something of note then to do publish it where you can. The main idea is to know what you did and if possible it can be validated to an extent by publishing it even if it is something nobody applying for a grant would pay much attention to.

Being on SDN gives everybody crazy standards where now people are saying impact factor is crucial for an undergrad. Just to give perspective there is a significant proportion of students at top MD/PhD programs that never were published as an undergrad. Stuff happens nobody's med school chanxes are defined by whether or not they get published nonetheless the impact factor of where they do

 

[Law2Doc]

Remember we're talking about the undergrad level here and at that MD not even MD/PhD. Look getting published in a top journal in undergrad is a great thing for any resume. But it's definitely in the OPs interest for the sake of medical school applications where the standard is to show you understand what you did and if you can publish it anywhere to validate that you did something of note then to do publish it where you can. The main idea is to know what you did and if possible it can be validated to an extent by publishing it even if it is something nobody applying for a grant would pay much attention to.

Being on SDN gives everybody crazy standards where now people are saying impact factor is crucial for an undergrad. Just to give perspective there is a significant proportion of students at top MD/PhD programs that never were published as an undergrad. Stuff happens nobody's med school chanxes are defined by whether or not they get published nonetheless the impact factor of where they do

So you are saying that the email I just got from the "Open Journal of Applied Medical Research" (Im parphrasing the name) which best I can tell will publish almost anything you submit online for a mere $1000 is going to improve this guys CV in the eyes of someone who actually does research? Where you publish does matter to certain people. Doesn't have to be nature, JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, but it can't be on the other extreme either. The guys I know who do research and sit on adcoms are very tuned into this world, and I doubt they lower their threshold of what impresses them because it's med school not PhD.

 

[mmmcdowe]

Resubmit it and list it as submitted.

 

[Oranges2]

my PI informed me that we recently submitted a couple months ago, so I included 1 sentence in my research work and activities paragraph just saying it was recently submitted in a peer review journal and left it at that.. not sure where the paper is now since I no longer work for the lab (having graduated)

 

[Long Way to Go]

So you are saying that the email I just got from the "Open Journal of Applied Medical Research" (Im parphrasing the name) which best I can tell will publish almost anything you submit online for a mere $1000 is going to improve this guys CV in the eyes of someone who actually does research? Where you publish does matter to certain people. Doesn't have to be nature, JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, but it can't be on the other extreme either. The guys I know who do research and sit on adcoms are very tuned into this world, and I doubt they lower their threshold of what impresses them because it's med school not PhD.

Right, but that's not the extreme. If it doesn't meet JAMA's criteria, they can still try for Circulation (IF 15), and then American Heart Journal (IF 4.5), and then the Journal of Cardiovascular Translational Research (IF 2.7). Obviously there's a point at which a publication doesn't become as respected, but do you really think that's it's not an accomplishment for an undergrad to write a 1st author original research piece for a third tier medical journal? The University of Maryland might not be Hopkins, but it is far more similar to it than the Saba School of Medicine.

 

[GrapesofRath]

So you are saying that the email I just got from the "Open Journal of Applied Medical Research" (Im parphrasing the name) which best I can tell will publish almost anything you submit online for a mere $1000 is going to improve this guys CV in the eyes of someone who actually does research? Where you publish does matter to certain people. Doesn't have to be nature, JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, but it can't be on the other extreme either. The guys I know who do research and sit on adcoms are very tuned into this world, and I doubt they lower their threshold of what impresses them because it's med school not PhD.

We don't have to speak in extremes needlessly. We all know these journals exist and their difference from much more selective and prestigious journals; saying publishing in Nature is better than that "Open Journal of Applied Medical research" isn't saying much, if anything at all. That misses the point of this entirely.

Let's put it this way----many undergrads will put on their application any poster presentations they did or abstracts they made or conferences they presented at, even if they didn't win any awards there. When I'm talking about poster presentations often times I am talking about things held at their school and what not and aren't very competitive. In fact, I and others I know have been told put these things on our application(me from a good family friend who used to be involved in med school admission). Is this something that's really going to significantly move an admissions committee? No one said it would. But as my former ADCOM family friend told me, it shows you have experience summarizing research, talking about it and being able to present it. That's what is key at the undergrad level for medical school admission. To take it a step further, she told me many PI's in their rec letters will say "student X was very active in weekly lab meetings with questions and comments and made presentations to our lab and others that were of very high quality". That type of thing in a letter is something relevant to a med school ADCOM

Now, These aren't things I mentioned that are viewed as "positives" "and things to put on a CV" for grant writing and the world of research at the PhD levels; they are the most basic of requirements necessary to have any chance to succeed in the field. The standards are just not things you can compare. Those skills I mentioned above the ADCOM I know emphasized; being able to summarize and analyze your research, understand it, talk about it and present it---those are the same type of skills that are worked on in publishing regardless of where it is and that's why med school ADCOMs will at least note it and should they interview the person bring up their research and ask them to describe it just like they did for those poster presentations or publications in bottom feed journals.

 

[Law2Doc]

... To take it a step further, she told me many PI's in their rec letters will say "student X was very active in weekly lab meetings with questions and comments and made presentations to our lab and others that were of very high quality". That type of thing in a letter is something relevant to a med school ADCOM...

You are mixing concepts here. I would agree that these are great thing to have in a LOR. That's a far cry from expecting much benefit from listing a lower tier publication or an intramural poster. The research focused adcom would naturally put much greater weight on a PI saying you were a good researcher than he would on the latter. But that wasn't the OPs question.

 

[GrapesofRath]

You are mixing concepts here. I would agree that these are great thing to have in a LOR. That's a far cry from expecting much benefit from listing a lower tier publication or an intramural poster. The research focused adcom would naturally put much greater weight on a PI saying you were a good researcher than he would on the latter. But that wasn't the OPs question.

You might have misinterpreted what I was saying and they aren't different concepts I'm getting at but bottom line we could do this all day and it would just be cyclic and get nowhere. If you can publish OP----publish. Even if it is some no name journal, and even if you want to say it won't do anything to directly benefit an applicants chances to an ADCOM(which we can debate all day and have enough), the experience itself of writing a manuscript, learning how to summarize research and being the one writing and not reading for once and all the edits and corrections necessary(if not from the journal from your PI) is a worthwhile learning experience that's better started as early as possible.

 

[VlLLVGE]

I would include it in some form. If you consider the idea that you've done enough work to warrant first author on a manuscript that a PI thinks will be accepted somewhere, it's probably not hogwash unless your PI is crazy or delirious. I think we're all missing the point that a PI also thought this was worth trying to publish.

I mentioned in a couple secondaries that one of my papers had been rejected and it gave me something to talk about with adcoms, being involved in the review process and seeing the process of PI-editor correspondence, reading reviewer comments, etc. I think the process humbled me and taught me early on how silly the review process could be (one of our reviewers was convinced there existed no titratable amino acids between pH 7 and 9... hello cysteine?). If you decide to include it, be able to speak intelligently about why it was rejected, and what you did to change it, what you learned from it, how it's enhanced your understanding for the rigor of science and publishing in medical journals.

I don't think we can be so black and white as to say no paper is the same as a rejected paper - that's just ridiculous to me considering how little we know about the paper, the journal, why it was rejected, the PI...

 

[nervosigeneris]

You might have misinterpreted what I was saying and they aren't different concepts I'm getting at but bottom line we could do this all day and it would just be cyclic and get nowhere. If you can publish OP----publish. Even if it is some no name journal, and even if you want to say it won't do anything to directly benefit an applicants chances to an ADCOM(which we can debate all day and have enough), the experience itself of writing a manuscript, learning how to summarize research and being the one writing and not reading for once and all the edits and corrections necessary(if not from the journal from your PI) is a worthwhile learning experience that's better started as early as possible.

The bolded plus the weeks of research/review of relevant prior papers is exactly why I thought of including it - in what way can you reference this work without mentioning the paper itself?
It's much more than what is involved in any poster or conference paper.

I take the point about holding it over for secondary though I see the process as more than just a "failure"....regardless of outcome.

 

[235009]

I would take things even a step further.

It's not like your only two journal choices are NEJM and then the journal of crap.

Getting a paper rejected is a natural part of the process. Even for experienced researchers with federal funding, a high proportion of papers they submit get rejected. If everyone gave up on a paper after one rejection, half the journals in the country would be empty.

Getting one rejection hardly means your manuscript is crap. Sometimes it just means that you got a cranky reviewer, or that something that seemed obvious in your head wasn't apparent to them and you just recraft the message a bit.

In my specialty there are three good general surgery all with relatively similar impact factors. While there is something of an established pecking order in them, it's hardly like if your study got rejected at Annals of Surgery but subsequently accepted in JAMA Surgery that means it is a bad study.

I've even known people who have "failed upwards" - a manuscript got rejected at a specialty specific journal, so they refocused it a little bit and got it accepted at JAMA.

The only time a paper is a failure is if you give up on it, not when it gets a single rejection.

I don't know that I entirely agree with your reasoning here. Obviously I'm not an adcom and would probably slit my own wrists before I ever did that kind of job, but I have done a fair amount with residency selection. I would say that "any publication even in an open access online-only journal with an APC" is looked on much more favorably at our level, and a letter about "he's a good researcher" from a PI is essentially worthless.

I would argue this: getting a published anywhere (even a "bad" journal) is an accomplishment. It is difficult. Even the best papers in the best journals that I have authored have taken an extraordinary amount of work, writing the manuscript, arguing with reviewers, dealing with editors... it's really hard, no matter how good or bad the journal is. I'll echo SouthernSurgeon's comment and expand slightly - sometimes it is harder to get published in a lower-level journal, because the quality and interest of their reviewers are lower. I did have a paper this year that was rejected three times, and ultimately published in a far far better journal, because those reviewers "got" what I was saying, whereas the others didn't seem to take time to think about what I wrote.

I read a lot of posts (primarily from undergrads) on this board about research. I see all the nonsense about how only high-level journals count. I also see all the bragging about how "I published in Nature/Science." The truth is that none of them published in those journals; they were assistants for some guy who published in those journals, and were fortunate enough to get named as an author.

I was research-heavy all through undergrad, med school, and now residency. I always thought I knew a lot about research. But this year, having to design projects, draft protocols, defend them to the IRB, perform data collection, do my own stats, write manuscripts, submit them to journals, defend them to reviewers, deal with publishers... well, it's only been in the last year that I realized how little I actually knew/know about what it really means to do research. The undergrads on SDN don't really understand research (as evidenced by their posts), but I don't criticize them much because I was the same way a few years ago.

So long story short: you walk into interview with my residency, and you have a paper in the Journal of Open Access Pay-to-Publish Sri Lankan Orthopaedic Society, I'm still going to give you a nod of approval. If you walk in with a glowing recommendation from the President of the ORS detailing what a good researcher you are, but no publications, I'm not going to be impressed.

And I can tell you, most of our staff, our PD, and our Department Head would agree.

The above posts are pure gold. Agree with every word. Keep in mind we are talking about doing this as a pre-med! Having published a few papers I can tell you that is IMPRESSIVE!! Even if the paper was initially rejected. It's a LONG process and rejection is a natural part of it.

OP: choose where you are going to submit it next and at least mention it under the description of your research as "resubmitted to X journal". If I were an adcom I would certainly be impressed and it gives more credibility to your research.

To put this into perspective I was at an international research conference recently. When a couple of first year med students got up to the microphone to present their posters they got a rousing ovation from a room full of prominent researchers. Even that is an extremely impressive accomplishment for someone so early in their career!

 

[shtumpa]

Resubmit it and list it as submitted.

Genius!!

So you can write a bunch of crap (I am NOT implying this about OP) and just submit it a couple days before submitting AMCAS!

(don't do this - but for OP it is a good idea if it is serious submission)

 

[mmmcdowe]

Genius!!

So you can write a bunch of crap (I am NOT implying this about OP) and just submit it a couple days before submitting AMCAS!

(don't do this - but for OP it is a good idea if it is serious submission)

You'd be surprised how common this is in medical school when applying to residency, which is why submitted works are weighed much less heavily.

 

[justadream]

If you submitted a first author journal paper (with PI support) which was accepted for peer review but then rejected, is it worth mentioning in the application - i.e. talking about the learning experience as part of the research activity description? Or would it be perceived negatively?

Thanks!

@Goro @gyngyn @Catalystik @LizzyM

What does this mean? Some articles aren't even "accepted for peer review"?

How would you know this too? They tell you that your article passed an initial screen?

 

[mmmcdowe]

What does this mean? Some articles aren't even "accepted for peer review"?

How would you know this too? They tell you that your article passed an initial screen?

Some times they get rejected without review by the editor. Sometimes it is better because you can just move one quickly, but the one con is you don't get detailed criticisms that may help you make it better for the next journal.

 

[Goro]

This happened to one of my collaborators...Rejected literally within minutes of submission!

Some times they get rejected without review by the editor. Sometimes it is better because you can just move one quickly, but the one con is you don't get detailed criticisms that may help you make it better for the next journal.

 

[Long Way to Go]

The above posts are pure gold. Agree with every word. Keep in mind we are talking about doing this as a pre-med! Having published a few papers I can tell you that is IMPRESSIVE!! Even if the paper was initially rejected. It's a LONG process and rejection is a natural part of it.

OP: choose where you are going to submit it next and at least mention it under the description of your research as "resubmitted to X journal". If I were an adcom I would certainly be impressed and it gives more credibility to your research.

To put this into perspective I was at an international research conference recently. When a couple of first year med students got up to the microphone to present their posters they got a rousing ovation from a room full of prominent researchers. Even that is an extremely impressive accomplishment for someone so early in their career!

I was at an international conference last fall where a gap year premed research assistant came up to give an oral presentation. Not only did he get a long round of applause, but it was a lot more crowded in that room for his presentation than for the fifteen minutes on either side of it.

 

[caffeinemia]

For pre-med/med, always okay to cite as: "In preparation" or "submitted pending decision" if you've resubmitted.

 

[chemist16]

Not sure if this has been said already, but I think the research experience is invaluable and should definitely come up on the application. With specific regard to the rejected paper, I think it's important to determine why it was rejected first. Did reviewers find big holes in the logic/design? If so, then if you bring it up, you should be ready to address those holes and talk about what you will do/have done since then.