This being a personal academic blog, obviously I tend to share more of my successes rather than setbacks or failures. That said, I think it’s important to share some of the more challenging moments too, so that’s what this one will be about. Back in 2015, I was fortunate enough to have a commentary on mega-events and public health published in The Lancet – certainly a highlight for any early career academic.

With a number of high profile mega-events back on the docket despite the continuing pandemic and the rise of the Delta variant, I thought now would be a good time to try for a sequel. So I wrote a follow-up piece about the dangers of hosting the Euro 2020/2021 football championship and the Tokyo 2020/2021 Summer Olympics. I thought the piece was solid, so I submitted it to The Lancet and went back to work on other projects.

Unfortunately, this sequel piece was rejected by The Lancet. Fair enough – I know that competition is fierce, and I’ve already had a piece there, so perhaps I’m being greedy. I retooled it and sent it to JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, because I’m ambitious or foolhardy. And in short order, I had another rejection. No problem, right? This is just the nature of the game. I retooled the piece again and sent it to the BMJ, because I might as well go three for three. Unlike the other two top-flight journals, the BMJ actually considered my commentary for a long time. Their rejection letter was personal and kind, for which I’m grateful. Honestly, a personal touch means a lot.

By this time, however, the EUROs had come and gone, and the Olympics are just about to begin. Academic publishing is pretty slow, even with rapid-fire commentary efforts like mine. There’s no sense in calling for the cancellation of Games when they are already being played, regardless of the consequences. So this commentary piece will die unpublished, and that’s fine. But I’m sharing the experience here, and the text PDF as well, so you can read it if you’d like. I still think it’s a good text, even if it never saw the light of day.

Back when I was doing my PhD and just starting to send out articles to journals, my advisor told me that if I wasn’t getting rejected, I wasn’t aiming high enough. I guess I took this lesson to heart!