I often spend many months and/or years working on publications, so when the time comes to finally publish, the moment should be celebratory. Increasingly, however, I have found myself navigating “publication anxiety” that relates to my own mental health experiences and trauma background but also to the current publication climate. I imagine that many other scholars have similar experiences, but I rarely hear it talked about. Therefore, I wanted to address it here in a position statement and outline some principles I want to uphold to navigate these issues moving forward.

First, a lot of my publication anxiety involves fear of making an error that results in a need for correction or retraction. There is an attitude among some scholars that corrections and retractions are akin to Scarlet Letters on your reputation. However, I want to push back on this. While it is important to be as careful as possible and run robustness checks to validate your results, some error is unavoidable. Therefore, corrections are a regular part of the scholarly process. While it is ideal to try and avoid corrections, they are not a Scarlet Letter on your reputation as a scientist or scholar if they occur. Retractions are relatively rare and are serious, but they can also be a key safeguard in the literature for the common goal of moving toward a collective body of knowledge or “truth” and ensuring that research undertaken in a seriously flawed way is not repeated.

Second, scholars often provide heated debate and criticism of studies – sometimes on social media and sometimes in the literature. While this may feel like scholars identifying errors in a study, this is largely a different category of critique that can be classified as regular scholarly discourse about the strengths and weaknesses of a study. This serves an important role within scholarship as it can provide fodder for follow-up studies and new avenues of inquiry. While it may not feel like it, receiving this type of criticism is in many ways the point of scholarship and a sign your work matters. Particularly on social media, there is also some criticism that can and should simply be ignored.

Third, another type of criticism and feedback to consider is when people from the community that is the subject of research offer feedback on a study. This is important to listen to and to try to learn from. While I believe collective community feedback needs to be taken seriously, it is important to also recognize that all populations and communities are diverse, and I personally reject the view that any one scholar, activist, or community group can speak on behalf of an entire community. Many times, when there is feedback from community members about a study, this is also an opportunity for scholarly and community discussion that again is a sign that the work has been impactful. Where mistakes were made, this can also be an important point of learning for future work and for addressing larger biases and concerns in the field. Importantly, most mistakes do not occur in isolation and are indicative of larger paradigms and approaches in the field. I think viewing mistakes in this light can be more productive than making them out to be indictments on individual scholars.

In all three of these cases, I believe scholars have a responsibility to engage with other scholars and community members about their work. However, I do not believe that scholars necessarily need to do that over all mediums (e.g., social media, panel discussions, highly structured scholarly forums) or on the time frames that other people might impose on them. In my case, I primarily choose to follow-up on my peer-revised research via publishing additional resources on one of my own platforms (my website, Medium, or Ableism & Healthcare Now). While there is often a demand from those offering criticism for immediate responses, I believe that scholars, particularly disabled scholars, do not owe anybody a response on a rushed timeline. Scholarship is inherently slow, and it can be appropriate to respond to criticism within a few weeks or months, rather than hours or days. Moreover, a lot of responses can simply wait until the next publication, as scholarship is iterative and typically incorporates feedback.

Ultimately, we don’t publish work because it is perfect. Especially for work like mine that aims to impact health policy, it is critically important that research is eventually shared so that it actually reaches policy stakeholders. If we sit on research trying to make it perfect, we first of all never will, and second, we will prevent it from having its opportunity to make an impact. While it may feel great to have a bunch of people tell you that your study is important and impactful, sometimes, the most impactful work is received less positively. As I move forward and try to let go of this perfectionism, I hope to better manage my publication anxiety, recognizing it is a necessary part of trying to make an impact.