How Do You Know What Color Your Research Is?

For research to be publishable, it needs to be remarkable.¹ It needs to be extraordinary. It needs to be like a purple cow among typically black and brown cows.²

Who your research is for will determine what shade of purple it should be, or what counts as remarkable.³ But whatever shade that is, it’s still a shade of purple. It’s still a kind of remarkable. It’s not a kind of mundanity, not a shade of black or brown.

And it’s quite easy to spot a purple cow, or remarkable research—except when it’s not. That ambiguity begs the question, “How do you know what color the cow really is?”

If you’re evaluating your research for yourself, how do you know whether you’re right in seeing it as publishable? Maybe, the answer is, “yes.” Or maybe the answer is “no”—whether from someone else or from your own internal critic.

In cases like these, how do you know which is right? How do you know whether your research really is publishable?

The answer to these questions comes in two parts.

1. Recognize colorblindness is possible.

First, recognize the colorblindness, or bias, you or others might have. That bias might be either for or against your work based on how it appears.

You or your reviewers might be seeing purple, black, and brown correctly. Any of you might rightly see a piece of research as publishable or not quite there yet.

Or you or your reviewers might mistake black or brown for purple, or purple for black or brown. So, any of you might see publishable research as not really there. Or you might see research as being there when it’s really not.

In itself, this recognition doesn’t do much to answer the question of whether your research actually is publishable. But recognizing the possibility of this colorblindness is important. It’s a necessary preliminary without which you can’t come to the second step that will ultimately answer the question.

What Publishing Is: A Reprise

But before I come to that second part, let me come back to what I’ve proposed as the essential core of what publishing is. In publishing,

• you open your research to examination by others and
• others examine your research where you’ve made it accessible.

The point that bears emphasis here is that you can only directly control the first of these two elements. Whether others will expend the effort to engage and examine your research is ultimately up to them.

You can and should use your best judgment to discern the what that will be best for your who. And over time, you can improve your capacity for making such judgments.

But what others do (or don’t do) with your research isn’t something you can directly control. At best, it’s something over which you have only indirect influence.

So, what does this fact mean for answering the question of how to know whether your research is, in fact, publishable?

2. Ship your research.

It means, simply, that this question isn’t one you can answer by yourself.⁴ You need others to help you answer it.

You can and should do the best you can to make sure your research is clearly purple. Others might agree or disagree.

But whatever their assessment, your core responsibility is to “ship” your work, or make it available. In that way, you start the process of testing whether it is, in fact, publishable.⁵

If the “others” that are your audience agree, that’s great! If not, what have you learned?

What you haven’t learned is that your isn’t publishable. What you have learned is that it didn’t look publishable to the folks that rejected it.

But here’s where recognizing the possibility of colorblindness becomes so important. Even if your who rejects your what, it’s still an open question about whether you or they have been colorblind about it.

It’s still an open question as to who’s right and whether your research actually is publishable. But you can only get to the answer to that question by … wait for it … shipping it again.

By all means, you need to learn from feedback you get. You need to pay attention to what didn’t look purple to your who the first go round. And you need to revise your work as best you can so that it will look more clearly purple the next time around.⁶

But whether it is or isn’t is ultimately an answer you can only get to by continuing to ship, by continuing to revise your work and put your hypothesis about its readiness for publication to the test of your audience.

Conclusion

In the end, you can only know whether your work is publishable by putting it out there, shipping it, and seeing what happens. It works that way because publication isn’t something you can directly control by yourself. It’s something that requires others’ involvement.

So, focus instead on what you can control—sitting down, producing research that looks purple as best you can honestly tell. Then, put that work out there to your who, and see whether you get agreement or suggestions for improving its hue.

1. Header image provided by Kordula Vahle. ↩︎
2. The “purple cow” metaphor here and below I’ve borrowed from Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (affiliate disclosure; New York: Portfolio, 2003). ↩︎
3. For the “first who, then what” principle, I’m particularly playing off of and adapting the discussions of Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t (affiliate disclosure; New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 41–64; Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (affiliate disclosure; New York: Portfolio, 2010). ↩︎
4. Image provided by Bench Accounting. ↩︎
5. For more on the importance of making creative work available for others, see Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (affiliate disclosure; New York: Portfolio, 2020). ↩︎
6. On the importance of revising rejected material and putting the revised version back out for publication, see also Stanley E. Porter, Inking the Deal: A Guide for Successful Academic Publishing (affiliate disclosure; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 89–102. ↩︎