The Overcompensation Trap: Why Papers Get Rejected (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, Professor Stuckler here. I recently had to kick someone out of one of our research programs, and honestly, it wasn't easy. It's not something I like doing. In fact, it's never happened. And it wasn't because the researcher was a beginner, but had to do with how they were treating beginners. And the reason I want to share this story is not to go into the drama, but because it reveals a pattern that explains why some researchers stay stuck and others move forward very fast. So if you've ever experienced having papers rejected, or your supervisor says that your methods are sophisticated but unclear, or you felt pressure to look advanced before you've really felt ready, then this video is going to help not only understand what's happening, but give you solutions to deal with it. For those of you who are new to the channel, I'm Professor David Stuckler, and I've published over 400 peer-reviewed papers and coached hundreds of researchers to go from defining their topic through to publishing in high-impact journals. I created this channel to provide the support that I wish I would have had when I was just starting out, because I made every mistake that you could possibly think of. And this channel is designed to help you have a smoother, easier ride. If you're interested in RealSupport, click the link below, and let's see if we're a good fit to work together. So I want to talk about this pattern that happens, and what I call the overcompensation trap. And it's not because researchers aren't intelligent. They are. It has to do with how they respond to gaps in fundamentals in their training. So if you flash back to perhaps when you were an undergraduate, you may remember there was a lot of structure, potentially some hand-holding, and assignments that laid out step-by-step what you needed to do. Now, where many of you are as early career researchers, you might feel like you've been thrown off the deep end. Suddenly, you find yourself in a place where there isn't any structure. You're expected to figure things out for yourself. How to do a lit review. How to find a winning topic. How to put together a research proposal. And that may have even driven you to this channel, as you then go hunt around on YouTube to find information that you're just not getting. And the reality is, a lot of the fundamentals at the higher research level, at the graduate level, are passed down from mentor to mentee. I've been very fortunate to have many mentors who taught me how to do academic writing, but I didn't get any formal writing training from my research university. Hey, and by the way, if that applies to you, please let me know in the comments below, because I find this happens to a lot of researchers along the way. And so what happens is, you're getting thrown off the deep end, and for some people, that works, and others, it doesn't. I mean, imagine if you're trying to learn Chinese, and somebody just dropped you in the middle of Beijing and said, hey, figure it out. Again, some people will swim and thrive in that environment, but for a large majority, that just doesn't work. The common response isn't to slow down and strengthen the gap and foundations that led to that discomfort. Instead, what a lot of researchers do is go the opposite direction. They hit the accelerator. Sometimes they turn to AI to try to help them with the gaps and move even faster. What they're doing is overcompensating, and this leads to inflation, more methods, more jargon, more models, more complexity. In a way, what they're doing is they're muddying the waters to make them appear deep. But it's complexity without coherence, and eventually it comes to a crash, and that can play out as harsh supervisor feedback, a series of desk rejects, and what's happening is that the papers and drafts and efforts and proposals are getting pushed back, not because they aren't sophisticated, but because the logic isn't holding, and eventually it comes crashing. So this brings me to the part of the story about why we had to kick the researcher out of our program. The person was falling into this exact overcompensation trap. He was mocking the fundamentals, and he was mocking beginners. Just to read a few of the comments, he said, your PhD student needs support to find key words, really, it's funny. And things like, your community is for children and babies, not for researchers. This mocking isn't just unkind, but it poisons the well for all of our researchers. Our communities are a judgment-free space, and that's important not only to protect others, but because uncertainty is the raw material, the raw source of discovery. And this is why I'm very intentional about protecting beginners, because being a beginner is not a weakness, it's a necessary phase, and I just don't tolerate pretending not to be a beginner and then attacking others to hide that discomfort. That's not confidence, that's fear. Now here's the irony and the overcompensation trap. The researcher who was putting down our beginners was the one who had manuscripts that kept getting rejected over and over and over, and this is also why it was hard for me to boot out the person. Now that wasn't a coincidence. The researcher was doing a systematic review and actually didn't have the PICO model right, didn't have the keywords right, and it was plain as day that that was a source of the rejection. But ego got in the way of shoring up the gaps and taking those healthy steps back to the beginning, back to mastering the fundamentals and not trying to paper them over with just AI, which led to, in part, this false bravado, this inflated sense of confidence that was clearly overcompensating. Here's the paradox I want you to remember. The strongest researchers I work with, including very senior faculty, some of whom I interview on this channel, are the ones most comfortable saying, I don't know. At least not yet. And they're not rushing to look advanced. In fact, they don't care what anybody else thinks about them. They're focusing on getting it right and being correct. And so what I said before about muddying the waters to make them appear deep, the opposite of that is something that da Vinci said. That simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And that takes courage. And that's what we aspire to with all of the researchers who we work with. Because if you can articulate what you're doing and deeply understand it, you have that clarity. Suddenly things click into place and it becomes simple, not overly complex. Listen, if this video resonates with you, if you've experienced any of these feelings, or if for yourself, you take a deep reflection and feel like, you know what, I do have some gaps in my fundamentals. And rather than speed up, let me get serious about shoring them up and getting the training and support that I need. Then check us out. Check out some of the other support structures out there. But do take that seriously and don't fall into this overcompensation trap, which is not just going to alienate you from your communities of support, but it's also going to lead to getting smacked in the face with the reality of rejections, poor feedback, spinning your wheels, ultimately getting burnt out, and maybe not even finishing. Don't forget to click subscribe. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Transcribed by https://otter.ai