Sometimes I regret checking my e-mail before breakfast.

[rebeccmeister]

Manuscript of Doom number whatever got rejected again. This is journal number three.

A hard part of that is that there's a lot of emotional baggage/emotional processing involved in working on manuscripts from my dissertation. The quick summary of the reviews from this round are of the, "But why didn't you design your experiments better/differently?" and I can't travel back in time, or I would have done so for multiple cases. Oh reviewers, if only you understood what it took just to get these ones done. And I just hope I can spare my successor in the lab from a similar fate.

Sigh. Grumble. Time to make coffee.

Comments

[bluepapercup]

hugs, hon. a crappy way to start the day.

I'm sorry you were rejected. I wish you could attach an Addendum of Circumstances.

[ivy]

Yeah, criticism that is basically "travel back in time, and then..." is hard to take for sure. "I'll... get right on that for next time!" is pretty much as good as one has. Sympathy.

[annikusrex]

Sorry, so lame! Science seems so hard. At least when I lose in the law I can usually blame it on factors completely out of my control, and then it's on to the next thing, no revisiting.

[rebeccmeister]

Yeah, this got me reflecting on how I can never completely leave the intellectual baggage behind - it just keeps accumulating and follows me wherever I go!

Reading the reviews more carefully today, one thing that's especially frustrating is a good part of the justification for rejection comes from the fact that I decided against including a whole bunch of additional analyses because they would have made the manuscript really difficult to write succinctly. Argh! I could try to appeal the decision, but it doesn't seem to me like there's a point.