Reviewing #5--Being on the other end


So, you've poured yourself into a paper to make it the best paper you can write.  You and your co-authors, if any, have read and re-read and re-read the paper, generating endless versions marked up with balloons from "track changes" and comments.  You finally send it out and, after a seemingly interminable amount of time, you get the reviews back.  Your heart clenches, you break into a cold sweat, and your hand hesitates over the mouse, ready to open the email.  You can't quite bring yourself to click the mouse.  You know you must.  You know you must suck it up and open the email, but you just can't make yourself.  What if the reviews are bad?  Worse, what if the paper has been rejected?

If that happens to you, read this blog post.

You are not alone!

I'm semi-retired and old enough that those critical notifications came by mail early in my career.  Bad enough having an email staring at you waiting to be opened.  It's worse if it's a letter sitting on your desk, mocking you, daring you to have your ego deflated.  Okay, so maybe it just seems like it was worse because at that stage of my career, I wasn't so experienced.  Now that I'm retired and the stakes are essentially zero, and I've got a long and successful career behind me, negative reviews don't scare me any more.  But believe me, I vividly remember the days they did.

When you finally open the email, you will find one of a number of possibilities.
  1. The editor has rejected your paper without review.  This often happens for reasons you can fix. I had a paper rejected because it was too narrow in scope.  It was, actually, and we fixed that and it was eventually published.  Or the paper is not considered suitable for that journal, for whatever reason.  Easy--submit it to another journal.  Although it sounds awful on its face, a rejection without review is not such a bad thing, and is rarely because the paper is so awful the editor does not want to burden any reviewers with it (although that can happen, too).  That can be fixed, too, but sometimes the editor is not very helpful in telling you that.
  2. The editor has rejected your paper after review.  This is the worst-case scenario.  On the good side, though, when you do read the reviews, you are prepared.  You expect them to be bad.  Sometimes you might be pleasantly surprised, especially if the reviewers have not universally panned the paper.  I would say that most of the papers I reject have at least one not-so-negative review.  
  3. The editor has rejected the paper but invited resubmission (or asked for major rewrite--different journals convey essentially the same message in different ways).  In this case, if you resubmit, some journals will send the paper out for further review, some will not.  Or, as happened to me recently, the editor intends to send it out for a second round but the rewrite is so good he or she ends up accepting the paper.
  4. The editor has asked for relatively minor revisions.  If you tackle the revisions with a will, you're home free.
  5. Your paper has been accepted!
#3 is by far the most common outcome, followed (probably, although I don't have hard statistics) by #2 and #4.  So don't be surprised if that's the decision.  In fact, knowing this is the case should help you click the mouse.

In Writing #2, I will address what you should do next.

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