Identity crisis

The problem isn't that there's not a lot of action to make interdisciplinary work easy --- and by that I mean one person who spans multiple disciplines and is working on a synthesis or a previously unnoticed aspect, not the ineffectual teams funding agencies love right now --- but that there's a lot of action to make it difficult. I was sitting in a microfluidics course recently where everyone was identifying themselves by what conference they went to. And you get positions and funding by peer review from other experts in your field, i.e., those who go to the same conference. Therefore anyone who doesn't fit into a nice slot is by definition at an enormous disadvantage.

Option (f) Start my own top-tier interdisciplinary journal

I imagine you've already tried most of these tactics, but my first thought is that this is an excellent question to ask of some mentors. Have you had a chance to sit down and chat with a few big-name X and Y (or even Q) researchers about these questions? To ask if there's a way to couch your X research that will head off the concerns about whether it's really Y research (or vice versa)? Do you have a sense of what it is that seems to confuse/trigger the reviewers? I like the idea of contacting the editor. Maybe there's something in your abstract/keywords such that your work gets sent out to reviewers who are more likely to misconstrue how your research fits? Good luck! I know your work is strong and I definitely vote for advocating for it.

Sorry for my ignorance, but aren't Nature and Science the top X/Y/Z/Q/W Journals around? Or do they just cater to F/G/H/I ?

rpenner, for computer science the journal landscape is much more fractured. Computer science doesn't have the equivalent of _Nature_ or _Science_; instead, each subfield has its own tier of journals. (Which makes publishing interdisciplinary work more difficult.)

Kleiyde, thanks for the kind words and for the ideas! Last night after writing this post, I realized that this is the perfect question for my mentors, and that I do have mentors in X, Y, and Q, so I will be contacting them to see what advice they have. I've been in this situation in the past and I have learned some tricks in the past, but the tricks seem to be failing me more often now. (Probably because my work is becoming more of a true blend between X and Y, whereas before it was definitely closer to X than to Y.)

Jeb, I'll consider (f) after I get tenure. :)

Frederick, you make a very good point about the, shall we say, "inbreeding" of reviewers. I've certainly seen/experienced this many times in the past, and it's frustrating.

oh jane, I feel your pain. I really do.

My problem has been slightly different because in the biosciences, rather than admit they know nothing of the topic, reviewers in X will grasp at straws, but the editors still allow them to reject my papers even if the justification is flimsy at best.

Reviewers in Y love my work, but Y does not have the same market share in the high-profile journals as X does.

Worse than that, the scientists in Y tend to be much more modest and deferential (which is why I like Y!), so they'll just say to the editor that they know nothing about X and therefore refrain from commenting on the X aspects of my work.

Really what I think I need is for the Y people say "It's great and who cares what the X people say, you should publish it anyway." But Y people don't do that sort of thing. They are too careful.

So I don't know if this is kind of problem you're having. If you're like me, I suspect you need a big-name collaborator in Y, who will put their name on at least one of your papers, in order to get your foot in the door.

I'm currently in the process of trying to curry favor by using this strategy on the charismatic leaders of X, since they are much more influential than the Y people who already like me.

It is not pleasant or easy, but I don't see what else I can do.

Lock the X and Y reveiwers in a room. They come out when they make a decision - and you don't have to let them out.

I'm asking this naively, since I'm not part of academia, but is option (d) really so bad? Not every deserving paper can be published in the top journal, just due to space limitations. The paper will get cited and gather mindshare based on its inherent worth and not which journal it gets published in (up to a point, of course).

I know that there are formulas for ranking papers that directly or indirectly refer to where they were published, but I should hope that kind of thing isn't taken too seriously. I remember a few years back when Bill Tozier was auctioning off joint authorship on a paper in order to take advantage of his ErdÅs number, and some people seemed to have been outraged by the idea. But the whole point of the exercise was that these kinds of rankings are artificial and should not be taken seriously.

And of course journal rankings can shift over time. Right now in TCS such a shift appears to be taking place, with former top-tier journals like Theoretical Computer Science losing prestige, and society-based and newer open-access journals gaining share.

By the way, one of these days you really ought to give us some clues about what X and Y are.

ugh. I feel your pain. I too straddle X/Y/Z in my field, and I've really struggled with what to call myself, which reviewers to pick, and even what sort of jobs I should be applying to. It's unfortunate that there's so much wrapped up in identifying in a small, little, niche, because I really believe that the biggest advances in science are going to come from people who are straddling subfields if not major disciplinary perspectives. But its a hard row to how. FWIW, I like the idea of contacting the editor. There's no time to lose there. Could you also contact the editor of top Y journal before submitting, just to see if there's any possibility they'd accept you? Good luck!

ScienceWoman, I like the idea of contacting EditorAtTopY before submitting---at the very least it will (should) save me months of waiting around.

Kurt, it shouldn't matter, but the Tenure Gods decree that "Thou shalt publish in the top journals as often as possible." So I have to at least try the top-tier journals first. Once I get tenure, I will have more leeway to say "screw the system, I'm publishing where *I* want to publish!" But until then, I have to play the game. (I may someday divulge what X, Y, Z, and Q are, or at least give better hints....stay tuned!)

ms phd, that's an interesting dilemma you have, and I hope you are successful in breaking in to X! It's not a prestige thing---X and Y (and Q and Z, for that matter) are roughly equal in that respect. I think perhaps Y defines itself more narrowly than X and Q, so that X and Q will at least entertain ideas of Y, but Y is less willing to entertain ideas of X. The boundaries are totally artificial, but there they are. Most of my collaborators are in X and Q (or straddling X and Y as I do, although maybe not as extreme), so perhaps I should find a more senior Y collaborator and see if that helps matters.

Oh, and I should add (since this has come up a few times in the comments) that the email I got from EditorAtTopX makes it pretty clear that there was a lot of discussion among the editors as to whether to send the paper out for review at all, which ultimately they decided not to do. So I think the only thing that sending an email to the editor would do is provide a little more insight into how those discussions went, at best. Not that that's not valuable, but it won't get me any closer to getting this darned thing published....

I had the same problem with a paper that it literally took me 4 years to place. I was about to start sending to a regional journal, when I found a more inclusive in perspective international one. But it got returned without review for being "out of scope" four times first.
Since I am going back on the tenure track, I am going to concentrate on projects that I know will have a good fit early in the process, since this is simply a matter of survival.

To rpenner: I have found that there are definite points of view in the top journals.

My step-daughter the scientist was advised to submit to a 2nd-tier journal because Nature limits the length of papers so much it's hard to make them coherent.

I favor at least talking with the editor of Y to get his/her point of view and explain why it fits in to his/her journal.

Then look for the hybrid, competitive X/Y journal.

Try things like Journal of the ACM?

I had the same problem with my work, it was hybrid in nature and could not get accepted anywhere, always the same story of "novel, interesting in itself, but not of interest to us, try submitting somewhere else".

My solution was to give up this academic stuff and get a job in industry.