It’s all well and good to say that determining whether research is publishable is essentially the same action as seeing whether a cow is purple.1 But is that actually the case? Wouldn’t a purple cow be easier to spot than publishable research?
Talking about remarkable purpleness on a cow is one thing. But research doesn’t stand up in front of you obviously attesting its own publishability, or purpleness.
So, isn’t recognizing publishable research entirely different from recognizing a purple cow? What should you make of times when you think you have a purple project, but it turns out not to be publishable as you’d hoped?
In a word, no. Recognizing something as extraordinary is a similar action, whatever it is that you’re recognizing. It might be a purple cow, publishable research, or anything else. The different objects for this action suffer from the same challenges. Those challenges just take different forms in particular cases.
Sometimes the ordinary and unremarkable can be confused with the extraordinary and remarkable. Sometimes purple can be confused with black or brown.
Similarly, your research
- might be a black or brown cow that looks purple, or it
- might be a purple cow that looks black or brown.
1. When Black or Brown Cows Look Purple
If you put on tinted glasses, everything you see you’ll see as having the hue of those glasses. When a couple is newly in love, they might be said to look at each other through “rose-colored” glasses. Similarly, if your glasses have purple lenses, what you see through them will appear some shade of purple.
Without the glasses, you might look at and see a black or brown cow. But with the glasses, you might see the cow as purple. In this case, however, what’s exceptional isn’t the cow. It’s the glasses through which you’re looking at the cow.
When you look at your own research, it’s always a temptation to look through “purple-colored” glasses. Personal investment in research can easily color your assessment of it. It might look to you like the brightest and clearest shade of publishable purple ever known. But the research might, in fact, be quite ordinary and unremarkable.
Even here, the research might well be on the way to being remarkable. But what’s more remarkable is how its assessed through the purple lenses of personal investment.
2. When Purple Cows Look Black or Brown
On the other hand, the opposite may also happen.2 You might have a purple cow, but that cow might look black or brown.
Put a purple cow in the shade, or look at it in the dim light of early morning or evening. In that lighting, it might appear just as black or brown as any other cow.
In this case, however, the cow is actually purple. But because of how it’s seen (i.e., the kind of light, or lack thereof), it looks black or brown.
Maybe you have a purple cow. But maybe a journal or publisher you sent it to turned it down. To them, it didn’t look purple.
Or you might look at your own work this way. You might have a purple cow that would readily find acceptance for publication. But you doubt that, so you hold back on it, thinking that your purple cow might just be black or brown after all.
Conclusion
So, yes, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether research is actually publishable or not. But those difficulties are the same kinds you face if you’re trying to determine whether a cow is purple.
Purple cows can look black or brown, and publishable research can look like it’s nothing special. Similarly, black or brown cows can look purple, and unpublishable research can sometimes look exceptional.
Fortunately, there is a way to tell for sure whether your research is publishable or not. So, when you come across uncertainties about it, you’re not left hanging.
- Header image provided by Kordula Vahle. The “purple cow” metaphor here and below I’ve borrowed from Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (New York: Portfolio, 2003). ↩︎
- Image provided by William Isted. ↩︎
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