How I deal with complicated sets of results

I have run a lot of complicated, cutting-edge projects over the years. And based on my experience, I can say that complicated, novel projects are always a challenge to publish. Even if people admire the sophistication, novelty and ambition of the project, they may struggle to comprehend the results. Therefore, one has to think very carefully about how to pitch the project and the results in order for the reviewers to accept it.

One of the main problems in publishing a complex project is that most reviewers (and readers) will take away only ONE thing from any paper. If you publish a paper that says more than one thing, then, through a stochastic process of citation, eventually the paper will be cited for only one of the things that it said, and the other things will be forgotten. As far as I can tell this is just a limitation of human psychology. For this reason, these days I try to say only one thing in a paper, and I try to publish multiple papers on a study that has multiple different results.

So when your complicated study has multiple results, the first issue that you need to resolve is: which of the many results should you focus on for the first paper? Because the best academic jobs go to those who have high-impact publications in premier Journals, the smart thing to do is to target one of those journals. And to have any chance there, you obviously should focus on the most interesting and potentially impactful result. But when a complex project has spawned several different results, it is not always obvious which of the many results is potentially most impactful. Furthermore, the decision about what is impactful is not up to you; it is up to the journal editor and the reviewers!

To figure out which result you should focus on first, I suggest that you consider another fundamental principle of human psychology: no one else cares about what you care about, they only care about what they care about. So in order to figure out which of your results is going to be most likely to end up in a high-profile Journal, you should look at things from the community’s point of view. What does the community know? What do they not know? What are the burning questions percolating in the community today? What kinds of results will make them happy?

A paper that focuses on a result that resolves a burning question, and whose resolution will make everyone happy, is most likely to be accepted in a high-impact journal. However, few studies produce results that meet that very high and very specific bar. Therefore, most high-impact papers are written in such a way that they rhetorically manufacture both a burning question and a happy result that are consistent with very general issues of interest to the community. Of course we’re not in politics, we’re doing science. One cannot manufacture these things out of thin air, they have to be based on very solid, novel, and compelling results.