In the midst of all the good things that have happened to me recently, I also got some rather less cheerful news: a couple of papers I submitted way back in the middle of last year finally arrived back in my in-box covered with a large dollop of the peer review equivalent of red ink attached. Even in my nascent academic career, this isn’t the first time I’ve got a negative review – indeed, by sending something out to peer review you’re inviting criticism, in a way – but it’s never a particularly pleasant experience, especially when you’re talking about the end product of four years of struggle and head-scratching.
Despite the numerous distractions of the last three or four weeks, the reviews, and what I can or want to do in response to them, have been fairly continuously in the back of my mind, and my attitude has gone through a number of distinct phases:
- Shock and Denial.
(Skim numbly through the decision letters. Words like ‘reject’ and ‘major revisions’ stand out in burning characters on the page)They can’t be that bad, can they? I can’t have patiently waited for 8 months just to get told to get lost, can I? Perhaps it’s just one particularly negative reviewer, or there’s just one or two points of contention which I can defend robustly and win the editor over.
(Looks at length of attached commentary. Notes that Associate Editor is someone quite prominent in the area I’ve been working on)Oh dear, maybe not…
Nice plan for content warnings on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Now you need a Mastodon/Fediverse button on this blog.