We got reviews back on the paper we submitted last month, and it was a "soft" reject--a rejection with an invitation to submit anew if we radically expand the paper and do about 7 more experiments.
Two of the reviewers were perfectly reasonable. They want to see some functional relevance of our finding, plus one or two other quite small additions. The third reviewer, on the other hand...took the liberty of listing several major experiments we needed to do, and announcing that not only would we need to do all of them for publication in the current journal--but we would need to do all but one for publication in a different journal!
In other words, "Don't think that you can just publish this one level lower, because I'll be on your ass about these experiments anyhow." Gee, way to use the anonymity of peer review to threaten that similarly bad reviews will follow us wherever we go.
In addition, this reviewer made some fairly outrageous requests--the most mind-boggling being that we should replicate our main finding in a different, "higher" species. You know, because who the heck studies our stupid organism? (DrdrA, didn't you get a similar weird critique once?)
I'm frustrated for many reasons. First, that this nutjob reviewer may have made the difference between "revise and resubmit" and "reject." This is the first time I've had an outright obstreperous reviewer, and boy does it burn.
Second, that the functional experiment everyone wants to see is going to be technically rather difficult. I understand its importance, but I'm less sanguine than GradAdvisor that we can do it.
Third, that I had thought the worst outcome for this paper would be rejection, after which we'd do a couple little experiments, and resubmit it at the next tier down. It's probably the last first-author paper of my grad lab, and I want desperately for it to be off my plate. But since GradAdvisor wants us to try the revise-and-expand route, it will be on my plate for many, many more months--and I'll be spending some serious time on difficult experiments. All the while I'm trying to get my postdoc experiments done.
I sort of wish that GradAdvisor would call the editor for a chat, just to get more information (did the normal reviewers vote for revise/resubmit? were there other comments we should be aware of? does the editor realize how insane a few of Crazy Reviewer's comments were?) but that doesn't seem to be the plan. I don't really understand how PIs decide whether to bug editors about decisions or not.
I am tired and feel trapped into doing a bunch more experiments that I'm not sure will be workable...but because all the reviewers wanted to see functional results, I don't think we can just submit the paper one tier down and get it published as is. And two tiers down would seem a bit silly for what we think is a major, textbook-changing finding. But I think if I refuse to do all these experiments, GradAdvisor will find someone else to do them, and I will probably lose first authorship, which is not acceptable to me at this point.
So, back to the bench it is.
15 years ago
7 comments:
Hmm, sucks, sorry to hear this. My first thought is that you are probably overly irritated by all of this right now, particularly because of reviewer 3. It's always disappointing to get news like this. Put the reviews away for a few days, and then go look at them again.
Think of how much better and more satisfying your paper will be once you do the experiments that all three of the reviewers are agreeing need to be there. Constructive peer review is really the best thing.
Once you have all of the necessary experiments finished, then you can consider how you will handle Reviewer 3's outrageous demands. And just because s/he threatens to follow you to lower journals doesn't mean s/he will. You can always provide a history of review to the editor at the new journal if you feel you have a sound reason for not following Crackhead #3's demands.
Candid Engineer offers, as always, sage advice. If there are experiments all the reviewers agree on, I say do them. Then consider how to handle Reviewer #3. For me, it's always Reviewer #1 who ends up being the total ass monkey.
Yep - I agree with Candid and Isis. If you feel strongly enough that some of the reviewers' demands were unreasonable, put that and your justification for not doing them in your cover letter when your resubmit.
FWIW, I was in EXACTLY the same situation a couple of years ago with a paper from my postdoc lab that characterized a new experimental model we had established that absolutely needed to be published as the rest of my subsequent work had used this model. The reviews for the original submission were positive but a lot more work was demanded (including a request to reproduce our model in another species) and the editor said he/she would allow us to do a de novo submission. It was our first choice journal so I ran a few more analyses to confirm our original findings (didn’t do any more animals and certainly didn’t look at a different species), rewrote the paper and submitted it. This time we had two reviewers who loved it and a third who wanted a stack of piddly little trivialities added. After much back and forth trying to appease reviewer #3, it was finally accepted and was published last week.
Hang in there and don't cave to all of the reviewers' demands if you feel they are unreasonable.
How would your post-doc advisor feel about you devoting substantial time and effort to experiments in your grad lab? Would you be able to do such experiments without affecting your time and effort on your post-doctoral research?
"(DrdrA, didn't you get a similar weird critique once?)"
Weird critiques are fairly common. I can think of 7 personal nutcase reviews that made *absolutely no fucking sense* or did the whole *you didn't measure the distance from the moon to the earth* impossible bullshit just to find 'fault' with the work.
Nutcases seem to forget that your paper isn't the end-all to the work in your field. They seem to focus on the things you didn't do rather than the things you did do sometimes.
Here's my advice - address the concerns of the 2 non-nutcase reviewers. Make the changes to your paper. Go all out - really focus on making those reviewers happy (because I'll bet the farm one of them will get the paper for re-review).
Then take a goddamn ax and rip holes in the nutcase reviewer's comments BUT FOR USE IN THE COVER LETTER/REPLY - don't change your paper to fit the loon unless there were good points. There are times when you need to hold your ground and do a better job with literature search or justification. 7 more experiments seems like a follow-up paper, and you can even address that issue in your cover letter/reply.
oh, and write everything you are thinking down now in response to the reviews. Keep it, don't send it. let it sit for a week. come back to it occasionally to add thoughts or clarify. but let the spew be. Usually my first draft of the reply is pretty vicious. After you get over being upset and have mustered a pretty good argument, open a new doc and let er rip. hopefully, the 2nd draft will be much more chiseled than slashed.
Ugh - that really sucks, I'm sorry! I agree with CE: put the review out of your head for a few days and then go back to it. Maybe there will be a way to do what he requests with less work than you're thinking.
Good luck!
Yeah, there's no denying that the functional experiment that all three reviewers want to see if going to strengthen the paper immeasurably--if we can manage to do it. I don't object to that recommendation, even though I'm nervous that we might not be able to pull off the technical challenge.
PiT, sounds just like this! That's about the best outcome I can hope for--I do think we can get Nutty Reviewer kicked off if/when we send in a de novo submission, because he was just that nutty. But as you say, who knows who will replace him?
CPP, I can't even express how much I adore my postdoc advisor's attitudes right now. I whined to him about the results and he said, basically, "Buck up, they didn't slam the door in your face so it's all good." Also gave some suggestions on the best way to approach the key experiment, and never a word about how this will impact my work in his lab.
We've already discussed explicitly that I am committed to finishing the paper we have in mid-gestation right now (perhaps half-way through the figures needed), regardless of precisely when I leave this lab for another position. I do my best to confine my catch-up work from Grad Lab to nights and weekends. So my postdoc work takes a hit, because otherwise I'd put in those weekends in my current lab, but I'm doing my damnedest to be fully present throughout the workweek otherwise.
The good news about the functional experiments is that we don't need a high N. If things were to go smoothly, the experiments themselves might take no more than 3-4 days. It's the pre-experiment troubleshooting that will be difficult.
I'm also lucky that my Grad Advisor recognizes the bind I'm in, and she's committed to devoting the lab resources (read: techs) to doing absolutely everything possible to troubleshoot the experiments ahead of time, so that my work time will be minimized. It's just that right now, we have no idea how hard the experiments will really be, so I'm anxious.
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