Illustration Stijn Schreven A botched experiment, a rejected paper: such things are soon labelled as failures in academia. As for talking about them — not done! But that is just what WUR scientists do in this column. Because failure has its uses. This time, it’s Negar Nayeri, a Consumption & Healthy Lifestyles PhD candidate.
‘Conducting research at the intersection of several disciplines is valuable, but also brings its own difficulties. In my doctoral project, I use AI and data science to study how the online food environment, such as meal delivery platforms or social media, affect food availability and marketing. My work therefore sits right at the crossroads of computer science and health science.
‘Recently, I encountered a typical interdisciplinary hurdle: publishing. I wrote a systematic review on how AI is being used to investigate the online food environment. The search for a suitable journal was a real struggle. Most academic journals focus on a single field or scope. Opportunities for publishing interdisciplinary work are limited, especially now that due to budget cuts we have to choose journals offering publication discounts. After a long search, I found exactly two journals that present themselves as interdisciplinary and matched my topic.
One reviewer dismissed the core concept of my research as “meaningless and poorly explained
‘I submitted my article to the journal with a focus on data science and public health. It made it through to the review stage. A few weeks later, the feedback email arrived. I immediately scanned the message for that dreaded word “unfortunately”. And there it was: “unfortunately this is not a paper on medical informatics”. One of the reviewers even dismissed the core concept of my research as “meaningless and poorly explained”. To make matters worse, they misrepresented the study, as if I had developed a completely new AI system, when in fact I had simply used existing tools to sort the data. Their judgement was therefore based on misunderstandings.
While I partly blame the reviewers’ carelessness, the rejection still stung. Luckily, my supervisors immediately supported me. They advised me not to focus solely on interdisciplinary journals, but also to consider where the papers in my own reference list were published. That was a valuable tip which I am now following. Hopefully round two will go better.’
