Okay, friends, I need to grumble for a few minutes.
Early in the semester I submitted a paper. Two and a half weeks later I heard back from the editor: she thought I should either remove the quantitative data or beef it up. Okay! No problem! I removed the quantitative data and resubmitted.
Six weeks later I heard back from the editor: revise and resubmit. Okay! No problem! I revised and resubmitted.
This was a weird R&R, I thought to myself. The only substantive piece of input across the two peer reviewers was that I needed to expand the section on theory. Everything else was comments on my writing style from someone who did not seem to be a native English speaker. The editor offered me no comments at all in the introductory email.
I was feeling optimistic-- I had expanded the theory section and I had attended to all of the complaints about my writing, even though they seemed to me like pretty trivial complaints. Editorial Manager told me that the reviewers submitted their input on 11/25. I kept refreshing my email, looking for that magical decision email that would surely say ACCEPT or at most MINOR REVISIONS.
But no! Instead, after 17 days of sitting on the completed reviews, the editor emailed me to say that the peer reviewers are happy but she has eight -- count 'em, eight -- paragraphs of things she wants me to revise. On my first reading they seemed like reasonable comments, but the timing is all wrong: you don't introduce a bunch of new feedback in the second round of revisions. That's just not the way it is supposed to work. She should have sent me these comments along with the peer reviewers' feedback, back in the beginning of November.
Today I sat down to start the revising, and now I am even more unhappy. One of her paragraphs is asking me to restore a chunk of the material she asked me to cut in September. Another is full of complaints about minor APA style errors, like the single sentence in which I moved a reference out of parentheses and into the text of the article, but forgot to put the word "and" in lieu of an ampersand. But the paragraph that is making me question my life choices is the one where she told me to expand my lit review and emphasize more recent references. When I first read that comment I thought, "Okay! No problem!" This isn't my primary research area and I wasn't surprised that she wanted me to look a little further in the literature. But YOU GUYS, she told me to add four specific references -- of which two are ALREADY CITED IN THE PAPER and two are MORE THAN TEN YEARS OLD and not especially noteworthy.
I am trying to be reasonable and temperate here. I know that online teaching has been especially hard on older instructors. She is probably tired. Maybe she had COVID this fall, or was caring for a loved one with COVID, and is digging out from under a pile of backlogged responsibilities. But I am still exasperated.
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