There is a famous aphorism in academic science - “publish or perish”. Publishing your work is that important, this much is true, but as far as I know, no-one has ever died as a result of being rejected from a journal - well not directly anyway. Of course, the saying isn’t referring to a physical death - it’s referring to career death - which for some academics I know, is a fate worse than death.
Like many, I am all too familiar with the pain of rejection and wish to avoid it. The bad news is usually delivered in an email that goes something like this.
Dear so-and-so,
Thank you for submitting your work to the [journal]…..the editorial board has reviewed your manuscript carefully and we are sorry to have to inform you that…….
To progress in academia, you either learn to survive rejection or perish. Survival involves not taking no for an answer and instead seeking a second, third, or fourth opinion - hawking your paper to another journal (probably less prestigious than the last), and not stopping till one has graciously allowed you to pay them thousand of pounds to publish your hard work. The alternative to this race to the bottom is to try to spin the disappointing results into something positive or suggestive of something positive - avoiding rejection altogether. thereby, resuscitating a study that should have just been allowed to die a calm, dignified death. An example of this can be seen in a story covered in the Guardian recently. The headline read;
“Cats may get health benefits from vegan diet, study suggests”
The study in question, surveyed 1,369 cat owners about their pets diets and their health. Around 9% reported feeding their cat a vegan diet - the others presumably, a diet which was not vegan and contained some sort of “meat”. Compliance to these diets was not measured and although I don’t have a cat, I have neighbours who do and I have learnt that cats like to eat-out - but rarely for anything plant based in my experience.
The owners where then asked about the health of their cats. 42% of the owners of cats who offered a meat-based diet reported at least one disorder, compared with 37% of owners of cats offered vegan diets. Either vegan diets marginally improve the health of cats and reduce the number of disorders, or the owners of cats on meat-based diets have some mild form of feline Munchausen syndrome by proxy - its an observational study so many explanations exist. Let’s assume the former. A number of other health outcomes were reported in the study - see figure.
Figure from Knight, A. et al**.
The dashed horizontal line represents “no difference”, and the circles are the observed differences in the outcome between vegan and non-vegan diets. The lines extending up and down represent the uncertainty in the magnitude of the difference. The fact that the circles are close to the line of no difference and that all of the vertical lines overlap the line of no difference is important. It means the results of this study are equivocal and do not provide compelling evidence either for or against a vegan diet. At this point, it is probably wise to deliver the last rites to your data and move on.
But not so fast. There are some signs of life if you look closely. All of the blobs are below the line (all favouring the vegan diet) and one was suggestive of a substantial benefit. The authors stated
“…we can correctly conclude cats fed vegan diets were healthier overall.”
In other words, our study didn't really show what they wanted, but the we decided to focus on what we wanted the conclusions to be instead. A successful resuscitation - the paper was published and media coverage followed.
There is undoubtedly a bias, in all of us working in the sciences, that leads us to look for the positives in our research and temporarily suspend our objectivity. The same is true when we are confronted with a paper that seems to refute our deepest held beliefs - we look harder for any weaknesses or problems in much more scrutiny than we would with some of our own work. I’ll leave it to you to decide which camp I am in.
*It may or may not be relevant that the funder of the study is an NGO called ProVeg International whose mission is to reduce the consumption of animal products.
** Knight A, Bauer A, Brown H (2023) Vegan versus meat-based cat food: Guardian-reported health outcomes in 1,369 cats, after controlling for feline demographic factors. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0284132. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284132