Paper rejections are common in research. Although researchers come to terms with such unpleasant encounters with experience, these rejections can be quite painful and frustrating experience for young researchers who have just set foot in research. In a study with PhD students from the visualization community, we have explored the strategies for coping with such unwanted yet inevitable rejections. Our results indicate many strategies to constructively handle the rejections. The strategies range from discussions with peers to seeing rejections as a positive learning experience . Author Shivam Agarwal says: “We hope that knowing about the strategies of others can help the students who are facing paper rejections.”

This work will be presented next week at the Celebrating the Scientific Value of Failure (FailFest) Workshop at IEEE VIS 2020. The work was done by PhD candidates Shivam Agarwal and Shahid Latif, and supervised by Prof. Dr. Fabian Beck. For more details, please check out our paper.