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I recently attended a political science conference where there was a workshop for early career researchers (ECR). During the workshop, a senior scholar mentioned that it is useful for him a journal editor to know whether the author is a senior scholar, mid career, or early career. Specifically, that when someone is an ECR, he tried to provide them with detailed comments even when the paper is rejected from the first round. However, I have also heard that most editors in social science, especially econ and polsci, don't pay much attention to cover letters.

I was wondering what editors in this forum think about this matter? And whether you may provide more/less feedback when someone is an ECR?

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Generally the purpose of the journal article review process isn't to make (ETA) rejected papers better - it's for journals to decide if they're going to publish an article or not. This may be somewhat field dependent for the conventions, but the editor you talked to is likely going above and beyond his actual job description to provide you and other ECRs feedback like that on rejected papers. (See Stephan Kolassa's comment re: feedback on accepted papers.)

Stating that you're an ECR is not guaranteed to help you or garner more feedback from every editor. It probably won't hurt you to mention it, though the possibility exists that some editors may see "early career researcher" and consciously or unconsciously be more critical of the paper under the assumption that ECRs, due to their (relative) lack of experience, may make more errors than more experienced researchers. I can pretty much guarantee though, that no editor is going to see "ECR" and intentionally give LESS feedback because of that.

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  • Interesting thought on journals not trying to make articles. Indeed, I believe this is field-dependent because in economics and polsci, I have personally heard from two different editors that sometimes they receive a really innovative/original research paper but that lacks an X factor that would make it a much better paper and they try their best to make it fill in/address that X factor/limitation. But as you said, this might be a personal matter.
    – maldini1990
    Commented Jul 30 at 18:17
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    As a reviewer and associate editor, I believe that my job is indeed to stop bad papers and to make good papers even better. Few papers are so good from the get-go that they can't be improved, and the reviewer (who is presumably an expert in the field) and the editor are absolutely the persons to help the author do so.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Jul 30 at 21:13
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    @StephanKolassa I should have phrased this better in my answer - by "the purpose isn't to make papers better" I meant "the purpose isn't to help authors with unpublishable papers make them publishable", as in the editor (and peer reviewers) are not obligated to give authors of papers that would be rejected feedback to help them improve.
    – WhatTheDuck
    Commented Jul 30 at 22:31
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    That makes sense. Even so, it can help authors of rejected papers to get feedback on what exactly is problematic about their manuscript, so they can improve it or at least do better next time. People might be more detailed about this for early career researchers. +1 to your answer.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Jul 30 at 22:50
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    @StephanKolassa I totally agree with you on that (and I do give that kind of feedback when I recommend to reject papers and I'm not crammed for time). I just want to make sure anybody who stumbles upon this knows that they shouldn't necessarily expect that kind of feedback when they get a paper rejected.
    – WhatTheDuck
    Commented Jul 31 at 17:42
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Ideally such a comment should have no bearing whatever on whether your paper is accepted or not. But individuals vary in their response to such things.

The only positive aspect I can see is that the feedback you get might be more informative for someone like yourself with guidance than old timers probably don't need. This would assume, of course, that people have the time to put in that effort. Some will. Some won't.

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Not a good idea. The first impression that comes to mind is that you're trying to positively bias the decision using your status as an early career researcher, which is exactly something triple blind peer review is supposed to avoid.

If your paper is rejected, then you can write to the editor & tell them you're an ECR and would appreciate more detailed feedback. Until that happens, however, don't bring up anything about your background.

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  • Thanks for your thoughts, do you think this is discipline-dependent? As I mentioned earlier, in the major USA-based polsci/economics conferences that I have attended, the advice appears to be to encourage junior researchers/PhD students to mention their status to receive useful feedback even if their papers are rejected.
    – maldini1990
    Commented Jul 31 at 20:12

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