As I'm revising my paper --- which got a flat-out rejection after being reviewed by a journal I'd published in before, rather than review and resubmit --- I've noticed some interesting features of the reviewers' critiques. None of the critiques are reasons why I've ever heard of a paper being rejected before.
First, the reviewers agree that my conclusions are too narrowly constructed: i.e., I should make a stronger (!) claim about the implications than I actually did. (The conclusions are narrow because my committee said they should be, and they're the experts in the question, so I defer to their argument. Based on what the reviewers said, it's clear that the reviewers aren't experts and didn't consult experts.) That's easy enough to say in a revise and resubmit especially since the opposite is more frequent.
Second, lots of comments of the sort that would call for a revise and resubmit: clarify this, restructure that, elaborate more on that, move this there, cite these 3 things, why cite X instead of YZW, try Q to see if [small part of] results differ, try the analysis of New Postdoc here because "This seems important." [how flattering!].
Third, attention to something that I've never seen anyone care about: several probing inquiries on my introductory paragraph. Introductory paragraphs, as far as I've learned and seen in the review process, just have to be there, and follow the traditional inverted triangle format.
"Broad topic is extremely important. Slightly narrower topic is no less important and might even be more important.... This paper looks at subtopic of the narrow topic, which has implications for the broad topic and the fate of the universe, or at least my job outlook."
The reviewer's probing inquiries are things like, "what exactly do you mean by 'broad topic'? For example, are you saying that feeding Wonder Bread to mallard ducks will cause them to spontaneously combust? Aren't you aware that so-called cases of spontaneous combustion do not really exist, and just came about from smokers falling asleep with cigarettes in their hands? [or something equally tangential to my paper as a whole]"
While buffing up the lit review following their suggestions, some of the papers that they referred me to on the same broad topic have nearly-identical opening sentences. [There's no issue of plagiarism; everyone writing about X has to find a way to say X is important.] It's a throwaway paragraph, the ideas do not recur anywhere else in my paper, and I am happy to rewrite it in whatever way that they want.
So, why the rejection?
After all the objective facts are considered, there's a judgement call to be made about the research's implications: should we try doing more research in the area, or have we determined that it's as hopeless as cold fusion? The PC view is that more research is useless. I give a concrete proposal for additional research, cite a possibly analogous case with impeccable credentials, and say that my results imply that it doesn't hurt to try this new direction.
This paragraph is the clear crux of the reviewers' objection, though they deal with it carefully. No one can object to the impeccably credentialed cite itself; they could say that it's not an analogous case, but for some reason they don't.
E.g.,this paragraph is "particularly troubling. Again, the author needs to better understand [literature ABC]. There are many reasons [not listed anywhere in the review and covered only tangentially in literature ABC] I and many other respected scientists disagree with the statement [..]."
E.g., "The data appear to support [my objective results], contrary to unjustified but influential claims made previously based on less sophisticated analyses (e.g., cite). In spite of the importance of these conclusions, I have some major reservations about the presentation and interpretation [of the results]. The paper includes numerous statements that are not precisely worded, not properly justified, or not true. A careful editing and where necessary rewriting of the manuscript with this in mind is needed. I mention a few examples below." This reviewer's examples are primarily the probing of the introductory paragraph, spontaneous combustion and all.
Needless to say, I just deleted the paragraph. If I made no other changes, I bet it would have gotten accepted to the journal which just rejected it. I did make most other changes and added in all the cites suggested. I am sure that the paper will now get accepted, but it's a bummer to have to reformat the paper to the requirements of another journal.
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You wrote:
"After all the objective facts are considered, there's a judgement call to be made about the research's implications: should we try doing more research in the area, or have we determined that it's as hopeless as cold fusion?"
Cold fusion was replicated by hundreds of major labs, and these replications have been published in long-established, mainstream, peer reviewed journals such as Jap. J. Applied Physics and Naturwissenschaften. Many academics, such as scientists and historians, have cited cold fusion as an example of "hopeless" science that was not replicated, but these people have not read any of the literature, and they do not know what they are talking about. They are waving their hands and making stuff up, or quoting rumors from newspapers instead of reading original sources. By any objective standard, cold fusion was immensely successful.
If you study the history of discoveries and science, you will find that most important breakthroughs were attacked, ridiculed and declared dead on arrival. It seems to be human nature to oppose progress for no reason. Also, as cold fusion researcher S. Szpak puts it, scientists will believe whatever you pay them to believe.
Sometimes rabid opposition to new ideas lasts for years, and sometimes for decades. Here is a good example from the book Charles H. Townes, "How the Laser Happened" (Oxford University press, 1999). Townes discovered the maser and laser, and won a Nobel prize for the discovery. Quotes:
One day after we had been at it for about two years, Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairmen of the departmentboth of them Nobel laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot of weight behind their opinionscame into my office and sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source as did mine. "Look," they said, "you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work. We know it's not going to work. You're wasting money. Just stop!"
The problem was that I was still an outsider to the field of molecular beams, as they saw it. . . . I simply told them that I thought it had a reasonable chance and that I would continue. I was then indeed thankful that I had come to Columbia with tenure. (p. 65)
Before -- and even after -- the maser worked, our description of its performance met with disbelief from highly respected physicists, even though no new physical principles were really involved. Their objections went much deeper than those that had led Rabi and Kusch to try to kill the project in its cradle . . .
Llewelyn H. Thomas, a noted Columbia theorist, told me that the maser flatly could not, due to basic physics principles, provide a pure frequency with the performance I predicted. So certain was he that he more or less refused to listen to my explanations. After it did work, he just stopped talking to me. . . .
. . . I visited Denmark and saw Niels Bohr . . . I described the maser and its performance. "But that is not possible," he exclaimed. I assured him it was. Similarly, at a cocktail party in Princeton, New Jersey, the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann asked what I was working on. After I told him about the maser and the purity of its frequency, he declared, "That can't be right!" But it was, I replied, and told him it was already demonstrated. (p. 69)
If you would like to learn something about cold fusion, please see:
http://lenr-canr.org
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
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