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It is Monday morning, the end of your tedious department faculty meeting. As if the meeting has not been dreadful enough, your colleague starts to brag about how smooth their recently accepted submission has been and how it was solicited by several journals at the same time. You pat their back and wonder if you should ask them what they think that the journal editor had meant by ‘not broad enough interest’ in the last reject-withoutreview decision letter you received. The colleague had been put on tenure track at the same time as you, but everything seems curiously effortless for them, while you struggle to keep up. You are confident your work is no less significant than the accepted work that they are bragging about, and you can’t help but ask yourself whether you have missed something important. Your mentors seem to talk to journal editors on a regular basis, and sometimes they even complain about too much correspondence. According to the rule of ‘six degrees of separation’, you are sure that you could get in touch with and eventually interest one of the editors with the details of your recently rejected work. You start planning which colleague you should reach out to first: your postdoc mentor, your PhD mentor or the ‘lucky’ colleague who you are sure will take the next open tenure position in your department. You probably do not know it, but you have probably missed three to five editors at each of the conferences you attended last year, a total of at least ten conferences involving numerous cross-continental sleep-depriving flights. The journal editors sit in front of you while you give the talk and they stare at your poster while you explain the technical details of the experiments. They are observers that tend to be as silent as possible, but they aim to learn as much as they can. Their role as your career partner is written between the lines of an editor’s job description, yet getting to know or talk to a journal editor could seem daunting at first. Here are some tips for those seeking to meet a ‘silent partner’ at a conference. Conference book email addresses Some conferences have ‘meet the editor’ panels, with the participants listed in the meeting program. You can go to the program website to check for these panels or lists. Some conferences are co-organized by journal editors, in which case their names will be listed on the front page of the website. If you are having trouble finding this information on the conference website, once you are registered to a conference, you will be able to access the list of attendees, which might be on the printed version of a conference book or on a mobile application. The domain names of the attendees’ email addresses will be one of the most straightforward ways to identify professional in-house editors. On the other hand, it might take more effort to identify academic editors; you might need to crossreference journal websites with the conference attendee list to find the editor whose journal interests you. Schedule a 30-min meeting with the editor by email if you are not sure that you will be able to recognize them when you bump into them. Editors are generally very happy to meet with you and to answer any questions that you might have about a future or past submission. Another option would be to talk informally during a coffee break, but you should expect that you might only get a 5-min slot to do so. Although it may be very challenging to interest an editor in such a short time frame, you may still be able to hear comments from a completely new perspective. People might argue that meeting in person is outdated; emails, phone calls or social media are efficient enough. This is a valid argument, but you might be the kind of person that finds a smile or some other form of body language helpful when interpreting the feedback regarding the ‘interest level’ of your work. The best editor might even give some brainstorming ideas, which could sound outrageous but which might help you to think outside of the box. In most cases, the editors will let you know how robust the findings need to be or how broadly applicable the work has to be for the journal to send it for review.

How to meet your ‘silent partner’: tips for approaching editors at conferences