Peer Review

During the last 4 weeks or so, I’ve been (in the background) engaging our “Scientific Peer Review System” in an effort to get some of the research my collaborators and I have been doing out into the literature. In short we are trying to get a paper published.

Peer review is an amazing process. It is frustrating, maddening, enlightening, inspiring all at once. It is the bane of my existence, and it is my only claim to legitimacy. It is the core of science.

Many of my colleagues spend unending hours railing against the anonymous reviewers of a manuscript or grant proposal. If only the reviewers had read the paper! If only they actually knew the literature! If only they weren’t so caught up in the fashion of the day, they could see the work’s brilliance and originality.

I submitted a paper a while ago with my first undergraduate collaborator at Chapman as a first author. She did a great job of learning a new technique, of coming into the lab day after day and running experiment after experiment. She got “significant results”, which means that she found that something is going on. She wrote a first draft. I rewrote it, then she rewrote my rewrite, and back and forth for, well years. The data are good, the experiments “worked”, but the question of what they mean was not really clear. This is the critical question of all science: What do the data mean?

She got into graduate school in Japan, a very gutsy move, and has learned junkloads of new science there. She is fully committed to the science pathway, a commitment that is not for the faint-hearted. The second author is also presently in graduate school, and going great guns. She is also a toughie.

So that kind of toughness breeds reciprocal toughness (from the undergraduate mentor, me). We have to usher this study into the light of day. Into the light of peer review. Bright, startling, hot light. This is really hard. Like a sharp rock.

Because we had presented the data in a variety of scientific meetings, we had a pretty good sense of what the data meant.

Our peer reviewers did not share that sense. The paper is 11 pages of double-spaced text. The critiques we got back from the three reviewers covered 16 pages. All the good and all the bad of the peer-review system is throbbing in those 16 pages.

Science is not for sissies. This kind of a review makes you just want to beam the fuck up. Get me out of here. Give me a real job. Don’t make me look at this paper again. Really? I have to get in there and entertain every one of the 16 pages of small and large criticisms?

Yep. That’s right. That’s what you have to do. Stop whining and get to work.

And now we are almost done with that. Every single critique, large and small is in our 10-page (single-spaced) response letter. The manuscript itself has been reworked, not beyond recognition, but to the point of “wow, that is a shift.”

Revising a manuscript is a little like the rough side of being married. Someone, more or less just like you, doesn’t agree with what you are doing and thinks you should change it. If you don’t respond at all, there will be consequences (you won’t get the damn thing published!). Doing nothing is not an option. So you grab each aggravating, sometimes embarrassing (it isn’t uncommon for a critique to make you realize how little you actually know), comment, and work it. Think about it. Look up articles that deal with it. Write and rewrite.

Then a little magic happens. As you get more familiar with it, you start to see the critique for what it actually is. Not for what the damage it can do you, or for the biased perspective of its perpetrator, but for the strength that it can give your work. To know the way 3 or 4 smart people think about your work is a gift from the gods. It makes it much stronger. You have to preserve its core with love, but these changes are little miracles of science.

So. All that is fine and dandy, but will the paper get published? Stay tuned.