Saturday, September 25, 2010
Bastards, Fellow Travellers And Holy Fools
Yesterday, I heard back about an article I'd submitted to a journal. For the second time, despite both referees recommending revise and resubmit, it was rejected. This'd be less frustrating if the reviewing was better. For example, one of the two referees was unsure the argument of the article was. Presumably then they didn't read the two sentences, one of which began with "[f]irst" and the other with "[s]econd", which followed me saying "Thus, in this paper I try and do two things" towards the end of first paragraph on the second page. Sometimes one wonders exactly whose peers it is that are doing the reviewing, and whether it's a group you'd want to spend your professional life working with.
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6 comments:
Now come on. Why should s/he take your word for it as to what the argument of the paper is? That need not be what you intended at all...
Seriously, agreed that this is frustrating. On the other hand, I assume that a journal that rejects a paper based on two R&R verdicts is a very competitive one. Therefore you're doing pretty well to get two R&R verdicts...
That is indeed what the editor said to me. I'm just generally not feeling the love for or from reviewers. I need to get published more, and work that I think we could both agree is worse than mine does get published in very competitive journals which presumably means reviewers are being nicer about it despite me giving them ample opportunity to repent of their errors. If I was feeling particularly persecuted, I might say that the profession was trying to tell me something.
I've had some pretty terrible reviews from pretty good journals too. (By which I mean the review was of low quality, independently of what they thought of my paper.)
You have to keep plugging away. I wouldn't say the whole process is a lottery, but if good journals are publishing work worse than yours then there's an element of luck there. Yours could be the next sub-standard piece in a top-tier journal ;)
Also it's worth bearing in mind that things other than mere quality of the paper matter, e.g. how topical it is or whether the journal's recently published a lot on that particular topic. Were you there when Jo Wolff told the story about his egalitarian ethos paper and P&PA?
Well, part of the question is whether it's worth plugging away. I think it's not just blind bad luck, although there probably is some of that. Too much of what I do is not comfortably within any of the main currents in the discipline, and I think that gets reflected in the reviews I get.
One problem with peer review is that it can be hostile to radically new work that re-defines paradigms. People will object if you haven't referenced main figures in an on-going debate. But fashions change and if you're saying something truly novel then hopefully it will be recognized.
Damn those human robots
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