I'm waiting to hear back about an R&R.
If you're not familiar with the academic publishing process, here's how it goes: papers almost never get accepted out of the gate. That might happen once in a person's career, but it might not either. The thing about peer review is that people will virtually always use the opportunity to say, "You need to cite this other paper and define your modeling strategy more clearly," or, "You're over-extrapolating in your discussion section, so rein it in, girlfriend." This is good; this is why peer review exists. Scholarly articles can almost always be improved. The reviewers will make their recommendations to the associate editor, or directly to the editor if it's a smaller journal, and the editor/AE will make a decision: accept (very unlikely), reject (frequency varies widely by journal), revise & resubmit.
You can get a friendly little R&R decision, where you just have to update the lit review and trim a superfluous section, or you can get a big hairy R&R in which the reviewers have set you 100 different editing tasks. And you can also get a lukewarm R&R: we don't have a whole ton of things for you to change, but we're not sure if we like your paper or not. I'm waiting on feedback from a revised version of one of those right now.
The flagship journal in my field ostensibly offers a publication option that they call a research note. Unfortunately, there seems to be a mismatch between the editorial board's vision for a research note and the everyday work done by reviewers and AEs in evaluating research note submissions. This is frustrating for those of us who submit research notes. Their instructions say that the purpose of a research note is to share findings that are preliminary, or extensions of previous research, or modest in scope. And yet the reviewers -- and more exasperatingly, the AE I'm currently dealing with -- didn't get that memo.
I had a full-length research article published in this journal in 2014, and I submitted a follow-up in January: here's what happened when we considered an additional explanatory variable, known to be relevant in this population. I got some reasonable comments, but I also got some condescension: this submission may not be suitable because of its modest scope. Some of the reviewer comments made clear that they hadn't registered the category; one of them was complaining about the lack of subheadings in my method section despite the fact that research notes don't require subheadings. Technically they don't even require a method section.
It's a ticklish business, writing a response in which you have to WELL ACTUALLY the people who are deciding whether or not you get published. My co-author kept saying, "Throw them a bone, Jamie. Just throw them a bone." So I have thrown them lots of bones, and reminded them with great delicacy of the ACTUAL REQUIREMENTS of the ACTUAL MANUSCRIPT TYPE that I have written here, and if there were any justice in the world they would have written back by now to say SO SORRY; this is an awesome paper.
But they have not done so, and every time I open my work email I do so with a pre-emptive flinch. I'll be pretty bummed if it gets rejected after this resubmission, but it seems like the most likely outcome. Harrumph.
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