Rejected

Remember a few posts ago, when I was waiting-waiting-waiting for a decision on a manuscript I'd revised and resubmitted?

Rejected.

At first I was sad -- so sad that I closed the door to my office and cried for a few minutes. But now I am annoyed. Because do you know what the editors said? I'll tell you what they said. For round 2 I added in three new sections based on the first round of comments. And this time? They said, "There might be too many things in this manuscript."

I am thinking about appealing the decision, because DUDE: don't tell me to add more things (things which, by the way, took hours upon hours of my life to add) and then say, "gee, what a lot of things there are in here." I think I will give myself a couple of days to settle down, and then a few more days to draft a polite query that does not say DUDE NO FAIR or suffer from a surfeit of exclamation points. (But in my heart I will be thinking "DUDE NO FAIR!!!!!!!")

I think an appeal is not very likely to succeed, though. And then...?

It is a clinically focused paper. (And may I tell you, just between you and me and oh yeah the internet, that I am really proud of it? May I tell you that two of the three sections I added at the reviewers' behest contain the best academic writing I have done so far? (Lest you think I might be suffering from a swelled head, the third one could use some work.)) So I would like to get it in clinicians' hands. The journal that rejected it is really the only one that is read by clinicians and academics both. If they'd accepted it, it would have been a significant step toward tenure and a way to advance the long-term career goal that is closest to my heart.

The best way to get it in clinicians' hands is to submit it to a publication aimed at professionals, not academics. It would be much less useful for tenure, and it would require a fair amount of revising now that it's so dang long. Clearly, that's not a perfect solution.

It could go pretty much as is to a different academic journal, but how many clinicians would ever see it there? Not very many, is what I'm thinking.

So: BUMMER. BUMMER BUMMER BUMMER. Not what I was hoping to hear. And I don't even have anything philosophical to say about moving onward or finding something better. BUMMER.