Late last spring a co-author and I submitted a paper to a journal that is peer-reviewed but also a little more chill than some of the alternatives. If you're in my field and your paper gets rejected from a fancier journal, you'll often say to yourself, "Oh well, I guess I'll submit it to the Journal of Chill Peer Review."
Much to my surprise, so very much to my surprise, we got a totally bananapants set of reviews back in July. The associate editor had received feedback from SIX peer reviewers, and had passed it all along to us with zero guidance about how to implement it.
Usually JoCPR manuscripts get two reviewers. Maybe if you're writing about something controversial there will be a third. In super-rare circumstances involving bitter disagreements, you might possibly get a fourth. But we were not saying anything controversial. It was a nice little qualitative study -- worth reading, I think, but not groundbreaking.
Feedback from six peer reviewers made for an absurdly complex revision process. When you resubmit a revised manuscript, you include a revisions table that lists every piece of feedback and your response to it. Our revisions table was nine single-spaced pages. NINE!
I was not at all sure what to expect in round two, but it was better. There were only two reviewers this time, each of whom raised interesting questions. The AE had a long list of nitpicky changes: remove this comma, say "for example" instead of "for instance." There was an extra space between two words on page 18 and she wanted us to take it out. I was surprised, again, that she offered us zero guidance about the reviewers' comments, because that's her job. I started making her nitpicky changes and found myself extremely irritated. I mean, come ON: why are you telling two adults with PhDs that they should say "for example" instead of "for instance"? I know from experience that some editors are more into wordsmithing than others. But this was ridiculous. Midway through, I handed off the rest of those revisions to my research assistant.
And then...I made a mistake. There were two files named "cursed_manuscript_final.docx," but only one of them was actually final. Without realizing it, I uploaded the one in which I had only made half of the AE's requested changes.
It's not unusual for a paper to get kicked back to the authors after its initial submission. Every journal has its own set of requirements for authors, and they go on for pages. It's easy to overlook something-- this journal wants continuous line-numbering, but that one wants the line numbers to restart at the top of every page. This journal requires that figures be in .png format; that one prefers .tiff. It's always something. So I wasn't fussed when the journal returned the paper to me with a form email. I skimmed the email and the last line stood out to me: learning outcomes must be submitted in a separate document. "Whoops," I said to myself, as I swiftly reformatted the learning outcomes and resubmitted the paper.
I did not notice, because the AE's changes had all seemed so trivial to me, that it was still the not-quite-final version.
The changes, however, did not seem trivial to the AE, who sent me the most infuriating email I received in all of 2024. She said she had stopped reading when she realized we hadn't swapped out one phrase for another with the very same meaning, and that she was going to reject our paper if we didn't get it right this time.
She was going to
reject
our
paper
?!?!?!?!
Did I mess up? Yes, I did. Is it annoying when people don't fix their mistakes? Yes, it is. Did this threat have anything to do with the substance of our paper, its scientific merit, or even its readability? Absolutely not.
In the moment, I found the right document and apologized for the oversight. But I said to myself, "Once this is published, I'm going to have a chat with the editor-in-chief."
It was accepted in short order, once I eradicated the dreaded "for instance" and its ilk. And then I found myself reluctant to contact the editor-in-chief. I had messed up, and then I had failed to catch the mistake. I didn't want to sound entitled or demanding. I hesitated to tell the story in an email because I didn't know where it might get forwarded. I dithered about it for a while. But finally, just last week, I bit the bullet and called the editor-in-chief.
And you guys, she was fantastic. I framed it very explicitly as information I wanted to share with her so she could decide whether it rose to the level of a concern for her, and I said that I wanted to be sure that there weren't any junior faculty on the receiving end of similar missives. But it turned out that the editor-in-chief agreed with every piece of my assessment of the experience, and wanted to ensure that it was not repeated. She emailed me later to say that there was in fact evidence of similar problems with at least one other manuscript.
It seems likely to me that the AE will know where the complaint originated; I probably did not endear myself to her with this phone call. But it also seems likely to me that she will have fewer opportunities to demoralize junior faculty and create needless delays in the publication of their manuscripts. Peer review is bruising enough without an overlay of folly and incompetence.
So this is just to say: if you have a phone call you've been meaning to make, or an injustice you've been meaning to protest, sometimes these things go better than you expect them to.
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