2026-2-12
This essay attempts an exploration of academic journals as platforms, from the point of view of a new scholar trying to figure out what it means to be 'successful' in publishing. Inexperience is one of the sub-genres here; a background fact that should hover over the text like that guilty feeling you get in your head when someone catches you doing something wrong.
Rejection in the 2020s
After life went online in 2020, and rejection became more a matter of digital self-presentation than physical interaction, I sense that my whole grasp of the thing changed. In good 90s slang, it got 'messed up', 'screwed up', 'went all crazy'. Our virtual avatars out here and doing more than we do in our chairs, we all now take failure and success like we were playing a video game: it's not me who died, but my avatar out there. It's never game over; I have an extra life.
I'll try to avoid too many video game analogies. It was just the first that came to mind. Particularly in the data-tization of visual landscapes that the architecture of the internet forces (e.g., timelines, surveys, captions, layouts), it can feel like its the record of life that matters more than life itself. What is more valuable to you: your kid laughing, or a photo of it? Would you rather eat the best meal of your life, or have a photo of it - you can only choose one. These questions are so uncomfortable they become offensive because they show us what we really dislike seeing: ourselves as we are, sans idealism. You can shrug off the questions of course, ignore me altogether, but you've already asked those questions in your own life, and will have occasion to do so in the future. Someday you might find your sibling taking a photo of your parents' grave, or your own child watching other kids play soccer on a TV screen.
Our response to seeing ourselves in such gross terms, so ape-like in front of technology's judgmental glowing gaze, is to adopt what in 2020s terms should be called 'troll mentality'. We get ornery, sardonic, ironic, disassociated; it's not me who matters, it's not my problem...or even better, what about you? And trolling keeps going, it's a progressive ideology with no inherent limit, to further distance us from ugly truths until we feel not a sense of superiority to truth but a bizarrely alien remoteness from it. We don't like in a post-truth era, we live in a truth-distant era. We know, of course, there are empirical truths that ground us. But epistemology has the appealing quality of being almost infinitely flexible, like US tax law. So long as we are creative, we can bend truth into a shape we'd like to cuddle.
When rejection comes in the digital era, we are not smashed by it. It doesn't hit us in the face, but in the keyboard - and we can hit back on the six or seven other screens at our disposal, adhering to the ironclad law of the internet that all energy must be displaced so that no discourse makes any sense. I'm angry on Twitter not because of politics, but because the trash bag ripped open this morning as I was taking it out. I'm sad not because of war, but because I've gained weight. I can't talk about the issue directly because nothing in this world is direct anymore, and if I talked like it was people would troll me. The trolls didn't take over; we took over the trolls, robbing the pioneers of the best weapons they thought they invented: flaming, loling, ghosting, and mobbing.
Academic journals in the 2020s
In a world where everyone trolls just to survive, and rejection and its corollary acceptance occur not to ourselves but to our online avatars, what happens to academic journals?
Firstly we have to admit by now that they are platforms like any others; in that I mean they are publishers only distinct from legacy ancestors by their vulnerability to algorithms and search engines. As interesting as journals might be to their dozens of regular readers, they are turned to mainly when scholars are looking for the right citations to support their work. This has always been; there is too much to read and so function triumphs discipline in the reading habits of the academic who would survive to tenure.
I'll say again I'm new to all this; this is a journal, not a report. Absent consistent mentorship, I have learned to approach journals the way I might jobs: as institutions prejudiced by trauma and profit motives. They want something and define it vaguely so as to get as many bites out of what people offer them, and spit back what tastes off. Like jobs, journals publish outlines of their desires and wait for applicants to fill it in. This role, of the applicant, is one I'm used to. But applicants of journals are called 'corresponding authors', and the shift is more than linguistic. It's your ideas, in nascent or partial form, that are on trial before a haphazard tribune of cornered tastemakers.
Like with jobs, I try to start with feeling empathy for the gatekeepers. It can't be easy being an editor of a journal that wants simultaneously to be popular and difficult. There is too much logical overlap with the habits and mechanisms popular kids at school learn to love (or hate) when they find themselves the object of too many peers' desires. One has to be aloof but not unreachable, mercurial in their extroversion, nearly random in the trends they pick up on, to keep the masses guessing.
Will the journal want these kinds of minority studies this month? Or those? What is in fashion, intellectually and socially at the latest conferences? What new tech is underdiscussed; what old problem needs rehashing?
I don't want to under-intellectualize the decisions editors make to put their journal into whatever position they can attain. Seeing them as a recent student and hopeful academic though, I can say with certainty that the mysterious decision-making of journal editors (and tenure committees, and PhD committees) all look to anyone who's worked for a living like over-intellectualized hokum. Editors must catch trends without looking like they're fishing; no mean feat. Helpful in this regard though, are the legions of un- and under-published authors playing the same game from the other side: we are trying to find new grass to mow and hope the nice smell of it attracts a big game hunter journal.
Sorry for the mixed metaphors.
Seeing journals as platforms has to be logical in the 2020s; what isn't a platform? This insight, if it can be called that, is likely late to the game anyway. I'll be in an internet search lasting five minutes or less I could find people writing/complaining about the gatekeeping of journals from as far back as the contemporary peer review method. What I mean when I say they are platforms, though, is that they are subject to the laws of attention economics as well as the exposure of data scraping.
The Index
So far as attention economics goes, it's only another way of saying journals have to flirt with popularity to get read. This statement shocks or interests no one. Maybe the only interesting thing one can do with it is become determined to read older or rarer journals, weirder or more extreme self-published works -- the kind of stuff that is mainly critical and outlandish, exciting and adventurous in ways peer review snips off like your friend telling you that ugly sweater you love is, well, ugly. That popular journals obey attention economics is just fine, so long as we remember there are plenty of authors who will write regardless of who reads it and sometimes they have just the kind of weird angle the mainstream lacks (and usually incorporates after it get sanitized/socialized).
The focus should be on data scraping. This is the big fortunate clumsy blade built into every computer ever made: a record, somewhere and somehow, made of all the data passing through. All the inputs, keystrokes, lines of code. And the internet is one big pile of data that can be scraped. The genAI companies making so much money out of so little labor were built on scraped data, and will likely continue to be so.
For a fresh PhD looking to publish, versed at least in the concept if not the practice of data-scraping the web, why not treat online journals like other platforms and get those nails ready?
Journals are ranked with a few seemingly heterogenous but basically identical hierarchies that revolve around SEO, which takes it queue from the easy metrics of citations: how many, in how much time, by which other highly cited pieces. One could spend an afternoon (or five) putting together a list of journals with details that go beyond ranking. The index in its current form lists quartile ranks, year started, current editor, top cited articles, and patterns in what the journal publishes. My hope is this gives me a short list of what to consider when I try to publish a paper.
I don't have any clever name for my Index idea yet. I am aware I'll need to name it something catchy if I want it to get any attention, but not too catchy because I don't want to get the wrong kind of attention. In much the same way users view platforms as outlets for their valuable content, I want to encourage new PhDs to look at journals as platforms - not gatekeepers, validators - whose acceptance of your work is not based on a universal judgment, but a grounded and contextual series of prejudices that shift from time to time. Understanding prejudice is key to publishing.