As a researcher with six years of experience, I should be used to failing — and yet, perhaps it’s not obvious why failure is so common on this path.
We are exposed to several sources of failure (and they are endemic: they exist to promote the excellence and sustainability of the system). Most of them are related to the scientific literature. Why, someone might ask?
A scientific paper is very different from a blog post or an article in a traditional newspaper, both in its goal and in the people who read it. Blog posts and newspaper articles typically aim to get the reader interested in what the author wrote, as well as to convey personal messages (I know, this is an oversimplification, but as a scientist, I’m used to simplifying reality :), see the famous “spherical cow” joke about physicists modeling animals as spheres).
Scientific papers are typically different: the goal is to share a result coming from experiments or data (at least in the empirical sciences). But you must convince the reader that what you wrote is “objectively” true (that is, it should not depend on subjectivity), correct, and “novel” (namely, something new).
To have this kind of proof, you need someone to check all these claims. Historically (right now this system is starting to fall apart due to the advent of AI), the only way we had to assess these aspects was to leverage other humans — in particular, experts in the field: researchers — in a process called peer review.
The workflow is as follows: a group of authors sends an article to a journal (e.g., Nature, just to mention one of the most famous :)); the editor of the journal selects a group of reviewers, who will assess the paper’s claims, quality, and results; these reviewers may accept the contribution, ask for some revisions, or reject it. In case of revisions, the process is repeated until the paper is either accepted or rejected.
So, reading this, it seems that eventually your work gets accepted, right?
Well, some journals have an acceptance rate of 5% to 10% (Nature itself reports around 8%). So, at best, just 1 out of 10 people see their work accepted. Work that, perhaps, took months of experimentation, writing, reviewing, and so on.
The process is similar for scientific conferences (namely, the places where you go to present your results to other people). There too, acceptance rates go from 15% to 25%. Roughly 1 out of 5.
Moreover, there is the process of getting funding through European (or national) projects. Again, there is a review process to obtain the money to do research. Here the statistics are even worse: from 2% for the most competitive ones to around 10% (2 out of 100 groups).
It’s a bit like getting a job in big tech: you start searching, you collect several rejections, but, eventually, you find a job and you can consider yourself happy. In academia, instead, this lasts for your whole career.
The question here is: how can a researcher deal with this constant source of failure? :)
Personally, I’m not good at it.
With each of these rejections, due to my impostor syndrome (note: most researchers suffer from it), I thought I was not the right person for this job.
So, what keeps me going? Perseverance, love, and curiosity.
Behind each failure, I still really enjoy the process: writing, doing research, designing experiments, talking about them at conferences, improving my knowledge. It is everything that fulfills me.
Not everyone reacts the same way (some are more cynical, others fatalistic, others simply never fail because they are excellent :)), but I think this endemic failure is what makes this job, sometimes, tough.
So, why am I writing all of this? Not to complain (well, maybe a little :)), but because we rarely talk about it. We celebrate the accepted papers and the funded projects, while the rejections stay hidden in our inboxes. Yet rejections are the most common outcome — by design.
If you are a researcher collecting rejections right now: you are not alone, and they say very little about your value as a scientist (and nothing about your value as a person). Take your time to be disappointed, then go back to the part you love — the process. In the end, that is the only thing we can really control.
As for me, I will revise that paper and rewrite that project. And, in the end, I did obtain the ASN in computer engineering. So perhaps, statistically speaking, sooner or later something does get accepted. :)