I have been overwhelmed by the number of responses to my post on my experience in the review process.  Here are links to some related blog posts.  Drop me an email or find me on twitter (@natemjensen) if you have an experience you want to share.

Kim Yi Dionne with her take on the process and a link to an older post on a paper that took a few years.

Tom Pepinsky’s response to my post

Kean Birch worked out his own rejection CV

There are a few really insightful comments on the post itself.  See Adam Berinsky’s note on his highly cited paper.

One quick note.  I worry that graduate students reading these posts will be very disheartened with our discipline.  Yes, the publication process is capricious and it really, really, really matters.  But the review process isn’t everything.  Ok, it is about 90% pre-tenure.

A few years ago I was asked by a chair of another department to provide some service to the discipline.  The details aren’t important.  I said yes.  He said something like, “I am always shocked by the generosity of people in IPE.  We have a field with some really, really nice people.”  I think this crosses fields in political science, but I’m not sure it crosses disciplines in academia.  Don’t let the nastiness of the blogs and the capacious review process fool you into thinking our profession is filled with nasty and capricious people.

I am on leave with my three-month old son.  My only visits to the office to check my mail or gloat about a Packer win.  I am on a short-timer at WashU, taking a position at GWU.  Are my visits to the office awkward?

A few weeks ago I popped in to say hi to my department chair.  We had a fun chat, he held my son Stanley for a while, and he literally brushed it off when Stanley spit up on him. This is how my department and discipline has treated me.  There are problems, but after “quitting” my “boss” was the same nice person he was to me a year ago.

This may sounds like a rosey take from a tenured professor.  Probably, but let me mention the review process one more time.

Tom Pepinsky mentions some criticisms of the review process and my former colleague Lester Spence seems disappointed in me that I didn’t engage the structural problems in political science.  I will disappoint again, but I can provide a hint of optimism.  We have a discipline that is full of smart, hard working, and ultimately good people that care about their colleagues and students.  The institution of the peer review process is the problem, not the people behind it.  But institutions do matter.  A lot.