One of the reasons work feels overwhelming right now is that I am hard at work on revising paper #3, from the fall semester. You might recall that this paper was extensively revised in November, and in the normal run of things I would have less work to do on it this time around. But! This is not the normal run of things.
Academic journal editors are doing a difficult job for which they do not get paid, so perhaps it is not surprising that COVID has taken a toll on the alacrity with which they are doing their work. I already groused in this space about the editor of paper #2, but really the editor of paper #3 has caused me more hassle and unhappiness. Just like editor #2, she did not offer me any comments after the first round of peer review. Okay, no problem -- my co-author and I made all the changes the two reviewers requested, and resubmitted the paper. But! In round 2 of peer review we got widely divergent responses.
Reviewer 2 said, "This is great!"
Reviewer 1 yowled, "Why did you add all this stuff that I don't like?"
The editor said...nothing. Not a single word!
My co-author and I drafted an email query, asking for specific input in three areas where we were just plain stumped about how to proceed. A week later, we had received no response, and so I re-sent the email through more official channels. This time we got a response, but it did not answer any of our questions. Instead it seemed to say, vaguely, that we should think about resubmitting in a different manuscript category.
Except! Submissions in the other manuscript category aren't supposed to exceed 20 pages, and after we added in all the stuff the reviewers asked for in round 1, we wound up with a paper that was 45 pages long!!
It would have been very helpful to get that particular piece of feedback in October rather than January.
So last week I cut out half of our manuscript, and sent it off to my co-author. She is a retired colleague who was traveling for the second half of January, and I am not entirely sure what she will say about the new version. It feels a little like she asked me to petsit for her English sheepdog, and she is returning to find that I shaved it bald. There's a lot less of this paper than there used to be.
It remains entirely possible that I could pour all of this effort into the manuscript and have it rejected after its second round of revisions. That would be terrible -- an index of a disastrously managed review process -- but I would not be surprised if it shook out that way. This is the journal where I would most like the paper to appear, so I am going to suck it up like a meek little buttercup. If it gets rejected I might write a zingy letter to the editor-in-chief about this subject editor's total abdication of her responsibility to, you know, edit, but such a letter would be unlikely to change the outcome.
I am a couple of steps ahead of myself here, though. First I'll see what my co-author says, then I'll make the remaining changes and resubmit and wait for the axe to fall, and only then will I wail and gnash my teeth.
I am making an academic career sound most attractive, am I not?
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