Article that shows the complete publication history of acceptances and rejections of a successful academic

I don't know if this is the article you're referring to, because the researcher is in biology, not psychology; and the journal article doesn't include the list of manuscripts, only the recommendation to keep one:

Stefan, Melanie. "A CV of Failures." Nature 468.7322 (2010): 467. Doi:10.1038/nj7322-467a. Web. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7322/full/nj7322-467a.html.

I can't seem to find the link to the author's actual CV of Failures (though I feel like I've seen it before), I can only find the article explaining it. However, if you search "CV of Failures" you will find some publicly available examples from other researchers.

P.S. I keep an ongoing CV of failures as described in the Nature article and I highly recommend the exercise.


Leslie Lamport details his history of publishing, including the Paxos paper, on his website. It took eight or so years to publish the Paxos paper.

Lamport received the Turing Award in 2013; and Paxos and its derivatives are now at the core of almost all large-scale web-sites (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, ... ).

From the comments: Lamport's paper on Buridan's Principle took 28 years to get published! He explains the long road to eventual publication, ibid.


After popular request, I'm posting this as an answer. Hopefully it's interesting to see a different example (or inspiration) of a successful researcher sharing how much rejection is part of academic life.

The economist Nattavudh Powdthavee keeps an online paper diary that displays the warts and all rejection trail for many of his (very interesting) papers. He also wrote some musings about his most rejected paper, now in the OTEFA Newsletter from p.7 - 14 times - but I'm sure many can beat this.