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

[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.