I recently received the most contradictory reviews I have ever seen. My co-authors and I had submitted a significant journal article to the leading venue in our field, encompassing around 8-years of work. We thought we had done a really solid job.
Paraphrasing the review recommendations, they ranged from one reviewer who thought it was one of the best papers they had ever seen (no corrections needed), through to a different reviewer who thought it was interesting but didn’t make a contribution to our field (outright reject). The third reviewer straddled the fence, suggesting significant changes were needed. Such a mix of reviews posed a challenge for the editor handling the manuscript, who decided that we should be offered major changes.
My response to the reviews will be familiar to many of you – what on earth do I do with that! With such diverging opinions, I first questioned the competencies of the reviewers; I then questioned our competency in writing the paper. What I should have done is followed what I tell my students when reviews come in:
- Read them, and then walk away. Take a day to digest what has been said.
- Write the shouty complaining version of a response – and then throw it away. It may help vent emotions – which is worth doing as it allows you to focus on what has actually been said.
- Get two different highlighters and mark-up positive statements and aspects which need fixing
Once I’d got the highlighters out, I’d noticed that even on such disparate reviews, they all identified something we needed to fix. In places we hadn’t communicated our thinking clearly enough or positioned our work correctly; in others we had over-explained ourselves, limiting the clarity of the narrative. We have a lot of work to do, but with this fresh perspective – and having dealt with the shock of the range of opinions – I found that each of the very different reviews had something to offer in terms of us improving the submission.