I wasn’t sure which journal this belonged in. That uncertainty became the topic. So, I’m starting here.
I didn’t expect writing to reveal so much about how knowledge is organised.
It began simply enough. I was writing papers that sat somewhere between behaviour, systems, and clinical practice. Each time I submitted, the response was similar, even when the wording differed. The work was interesting. The problem was real. But the question kept returning, quietly and persistently:
Where does this belong?
At first, I assumed the issue was mine. Perhaps the framing wasn’t clear enough. Perhaps I hadn’t positioned the argument precisely within a discipline. So I adjusted. I rewrote. I emphasised behaviour in one version, systems in another, clinical relevance in a third. Each submission felt like translating the same idea into a slightly different language.
And yet the friction didn’t resolve.
Not because the idea lacked clarity, but because it didn’t sit comfortably within the boundaries it was being offered to. What began to emerge was something less about writing, and more about structure. Journals, like the disciplines they represent, are designed to organise knowledge into defined areas. They provide clarity, depth, and a sense of coherence. In that sense, they are not unlike medicine, which is divided into specialties to allow for focus and expertise, even though the conditions being treated rarely exist in isolation. But the problems I was writing about did not arrive in those forms. They overlapped. They moved across boundaries. They refused to stay still long enough to be placed neatly within a single category.
The more I wrote, the more this became difficult to ignore.
It would be easy to conclude that this is simply a feature of academic publishing, a matter of editorial scope or disciplinary preference. But the pattern felt more consistent than that. The same tension appeared across different journals, different reviewers, and different contexts. Each operated with its own logic, yet the response was recognisably similar. The issue was not disagreement with the idea itself, but uncertainty about where it should sit. Over time, it became harder to see this as a series of isolated encounters. It began to feel less like a series of isolated encounters, and more like an encounter with a structure, one that organises knowledge by dividing it into parts, and in doing so, makes it more difficult for ideas that move between those parts to find a place.
Over time, this began to change how I approached the work itself. Writing was no longer only about developing an idea, but about anticipating the structure it would be asked to fit within. Choices that felt conceptual became practical. What to emphasise. What to leave out. Which language to use. The same idea could be made to appear more behavioural, more clinical, or more systems-oriented, depending on where it was being sent. None of these versions were incorrect, but each felt partial. Something was always being adjusted, not because it lacked clarity, but because it needed to align with a predefined space.
What began to shift was not the idea itself, but my understanding of where difficulty was arising. It wasn’t simply that the work crossed boundaries, but that those boundaries were not neutral. They were shaping how ideas could appear, how they could be described, and where they could be placed. In that sense, the challenge was not only to develop an argument, but to decide which part of it could be made visible at any one time. The rest remained present, but unspoken, waiting for a context in which it might fit more comfortably.
It left me thinking that some ideas don’t struggle because they are unclear, or even because they are contested, but because they do not yet fit the structures designed to hold them. They move across boundaries that are easier to maintain than to cross. In the process, they are reshaped, divided, or delayed, not intentionally, but as a consequence of how knowledge is organised. Writing within this has changed how I think about progress. Not as a steady refinement within a single space, but as something that sometimes requires moving between them, carrying parts of an idea until there is somewhere it can be seen more fully.
I’ve started to wonder how widely this pattern is felt. Whether others have noticed a similar tension when working across boundaries, or when trying to place ideas that don’t sit comfortably in a single space. Does it shape what gets explored, or what gets left aside? Are there ideas that are shaped early to fit a category, rather than allowed to develop more fully? And are there other areas where this kind of structure quietly influences what is seen, and what remains less visible?