The most painful writing exercise next to writing your first manuscript draft and getting your advisor’s feedback, is often making the necessary revisions from reviewers to get your work published. I know you’ve been working on this manuscript for what seems like an eternity and after you felt relief and excitement about getting it submitted to that top-tier journal (or even low-tier), it comes back months later with either one of these decisions.
Accept (with no to minor revisions)
Revise and resubmit (major revisions required)
or
Reject
Obviously you and your advisor were banking for the first outcome of an outright acceptance with no revisions. This is the most ideal situation and yes it does happen sometimes. But for most of us it doesn’t happen on the first manuscript that we ever write as a graduate student or for that matter even as an established professor. Therefore, if this is your experience so far, Kudos to you on a job extremely well done!!!!
Oh, I just heard what sounded like a crash…an empty car that just smacked into a large oak tree. Okay that’s dramatic but that is what I remember and you may experience when getting the Reject or the Major Revise and Resubmit outcomes from a submitted paper. This seems so personal initially. You read the editor’s decisions and scroll quickly to read the reviewer’s comments and can take offense to everything wrong that they have highlighted about your work. How dare they think that your work was not worthy when you literally just read a handful of papers already published from the same journal that were of the same quality as yours, right?!! Either way, this is a tough initial outcome from all of your hard work to get this paper submitted. But my advice for you is to not despair and to not take it personal.
After seeing this first decision and being highly reactive to the decision, I suggest to put the reviews away for a few days or even a week. This will give you and your advisor plenty of time to get your emotions out of the way, cool off, and try to come back to the reviews with a more objective viewpoint. Generally, after a break, you’ll read the reviewer comments differently and recognize that in most instances they have very valid points. I mean if you’re honest with yourself, you can learn a lot during this process. Perhaps you thought you had the most robust statistical approach for your data analysis but that comment from Reviewer 3 shines light on the fact, that you might have missed a major fundamental understanding of how to answer the question you said you had in your Introduction. Or perhaps you thought that your figures were very artistic and easy to understand but Reviewer 1, thinks you need to ditch the first 2 and recommends a more helpful figure instead. See the point here is that you are generally getting fair feedback from experts in your field who are giving you point by point steps to take to improve your manuscript so that it meets the bar in your field. Ultimately, this is what you want right? To have a paper that it well-cited, read by many in your field, and that shines a light on you as a scholar to help advance the science but also help advance you and your career goals? It may take some time to go through all of these reviewer comments and figure out how to best make changes in your manuscript. And you’ll have to decide whether to try for a resubmission back to the same journal or a new submission elsewhere. However, it is well worth-it to keep working at getting this paper submitted. Just think, at this stage you have a full manuscript draft in front of you with references and a set of instructions of things you can do to make it better. Feelings aside. This is very valuable. And you don’t have to forgo this alone because your advisor will also have feedback on the best ways to respond to the comments and help whip this paper into shape. So, with everything that you think that you don’t have in you to look at this paper again, I urge you to find it in you to pull out a little bit more strength and perseverance so you can go it one more ‘gain and work to get your work published.
I’ve always heard that the closest papers you have to publication are those that are either in the stage of rejected or revise and resubmit. And this is absolutely true. Be clear on the editor’s timeline for getting your revisions back in and make this paper again a top priority for your work in the days ahead.
Don’t stop (it will be difficult at times) until you can get this resubmitted and get the burden of the paper off your back again. It may be that you get it accepted on the second time around, let’s pray for this! But even if it’s the fifth time around with this paper, you have come to far to let it not get published so try your best to make those last tweaks and keep going at it. At some point, if the comments are unfair your advisor will have your back and reach out the editor.
However, once this paper is finally accepted, in press, and has your name on it you will forget all about the pain that went into getting it published!
Until next time,
Renã Robinson, PhD
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
