Brian Derby wonders how to respond to referees – in his case, of a grant application – whose judgement he knows to be wrong.
As an editor of everyone’s favourite journal beginning with N that isn’t National Geographic, New Scientist or Nuts, I get to see a lot of appeals from authors who claim to have legitimate grievances as regards a referee’s sanity eyesight judgement. A good letter of appeal is crucial — on many occasions we have overturned an earlier rejection based on cogent arguments from an author.
As Brian says, that opening line is crucial, and it pays to be as polite as possible, even conciliatory — given that any revision is very likely to be seen by the same referees. A good example of how not to start an appeal letter might be
- Dear Dr Gee — In rejecting my manuscript ‘The Doubly Negative Interaction of One Abbreviation With Another Abbreviation Is Not Contingent On The Positive Doubly Positively Negative Interaction Between A Third Abbreviation and a Phosphorylated Version Of One Or Other Of The First Two Abbreviations’, you are a short-sighted goon guilty of the same kind of mistake that those guys did back in Italy when they laughed at Galileo. You’ll be sorry! It’s clear that you based your ridiculous decision on the so-called review from Referee #1, who is clearly an idiot. If he is an expert in anything other than scratching his own balls, it certainly isn’t anything to do with my research. I demand that you reconsider my manuscript and get someone with at least half a brain to assess it. Why the hell didn’t you contact Professor Hornswoggle of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, as I suggested in my original submission?
More often than not, the critical referee will have been — you guessed it — Professor Hornswoggle from the USND at H.
In contrast, a successful letter of appeal will start something like this, even if you are quite convinced that the editor and the referees are (1) morons (2) a conspiracy based on your competitors (3) out to get you personally (4) combinations of the above.
- Dear Dr Gee – thank you very much for so kindly taking time out of your busy schedule of lying back and being fed grapes by flying babies to have my manuscript ‘Homoscedasticity and Hysteresis In The Heuristic Algorithm Paradigm’ reviewed. I’d like to thank the referees for their cogent, constructive and informative reports which will be of great assistance during the revision process. However, I respectfully suggest that some of the referees’ points might have been based on errors of fact or information, which might have been due to insufficient clarity on my part. In any case, I should like to draw these facts to your attention in the hope that you might reconsider your decision to reject and perhaps entertain a revision in which, naturellement, all the referee’s comments will be addressed, as far as I am able.
[There follows a comprehensive, detailed, substantive and specific list of points in which the author feels the referee’s judgement to have been in error, composed at all times with collegial coolness and grace, resisting the temptation to get angrier as the letter proceeds.]
Letters like this are far more likely to succeed than those that shoot first and ask questions later. Other strategies unlikely to succeed are
- starting a letter by saying that ‘I don’t normally appeal against rejections, but in this case …’ (Editor mutters ‘yeah, right’ and stifles yawn);
- basing the appeal on emotional blackmail (‘if I don’t get this paper in Nature I’ll lose my job, my husband will leave me, and even my dog won’t talk to me’);
- basing the appeal on the general interest of the subject (if the subject weren’t interesting, we wouldn’t have had it reviewed).
There is a view out there that Nature doesn’t consider appeals. This is quite wrong. Nature editors are quite willing to admit that they are only human, and therefore fallible, and that the same is true for referees. Whether your appeal will succeed is a moot point, but it costs nothing to be polite, and reasoned, logical argument counts for a great deal. After all, we are scientists.
To continue my struggles with the referee… The grant application to Wellcome was successful (hooray etc.) so I can only assume that my reasoned arguments to the panel illustrated the errors in the thought processes of the referee. I will continue with the strategy of attack.
More recently I have just received referees’ comments on two papers submitted recently to journals with initial letters not including n. One set of comments were very reasonable and demonstrated that we had not explained things adequately. That paper is being rewritten and we are happy.
Paper two was more interesting. One referee said it was wonderful and added the minor correction (include some error bars) to demonstrate he had read it. A second referee raised some questions which we could answer but number three referee was another story. First of all he/she listed off a number of papers by author X that we must include in the literature review (despite them being on another subject) then said our figures were not new and were all in another paper by author X (they were not, we read this paper and it was a review of work in a similar but different field). Finally it was stated that none of our previous papers on this subject were worth anything when compared to the previous work of a certain author X. I have to admire this persons cheek but I worry that any editor lets it go.
Henry, off topic, but I must implore you to, in the future, provide subtle warnings about the appropriateness of hitting certain links in your posts while at the workplace.
As I am currently surrounded by 6 women in my quiet corner of the New York office, you can only imagine the looks I got when my adequately large monitor loaded the Nuts homepage at full-screen size. The human resources department descended upon me within 47 seconds of the page loading…and now I have to work in the basement for the rest of the week as punishment for conducting “personal browsing” at work during business hours. Cheers!
@ Brian — I am agog – what was the editor’s judgement on paper 2? Did the editor take referee 3 seriously? From what you say, I suspect that Referee 3 = Author X, and, if so, the editor would have realized this and discounted referee 3’s report accordingly.
@ Noah – I’m sorry my
boobsolecism landed you in such hot water. :)@Henry Beyween comments the paper has now been accepted. Perhaps the editor feels hohour bound to pass on all comments if only to give you the pleasure of pointing out how ludicrous they are.
Actually I don’t think it was X as he is more subtle than that (I thought) but it could have been an ex-student.
I had a grant bounce back last year, and the funding agency has no appeals process. That was really hard to swallow because one of the reviews was clearly biased. “Dr. Brooks betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the literature” and then goes on to list a bunch of references…that..yes! I did cite. not getting the grant is one thing; it’s very competitive and I am funded by other sources so it wasn’t “critical”, however for the reviewer to be just plain rude and to have clearly not even read the grant was absolutely uncalled for.
Noah… you know you love the basement…all on your own with no one to disturb you and your softly flickering monitor… >:)
Where above did I say that I got to keep my computer?
I’m glad to hear that paper #2 has been published already. I imagine that even worse than writing “Referee 3 is an idiot” in the response to reviewers would be to write “Author X Referee 3 is an idiot” on a blog, and the find “I read with interest your comments about me on Henry Gee’s blog” in Referee 3’s re-review report.
Hey now! How come I’m not allowed to strikethrough text?
It’s easy, Joe. Just surround the words you want to strike through with hyphens, like
thisHow terrible it is when we do that.
…The wonderful thing about Grants…
Noah: My bad…that really is
hilarioushorrible…I don’t know, the first letter was kind of funny with the “scratching his own balls part” and all..I might publish the first paper based on the hilarious creativity of the letter. :)
I have had biased rejections before and it is the worst, but the best revenge is a cool and collected “this is why you are wrong” letter.
Thanks for the tips, Henry. I’ve copy-pasted it into one of my rubber MS response letters.
HG, saucy indeed!
I fear that a few editors out there (present company obviously excepted) are
foolsnot fully conversant enough in the field of the MS they are handling to be able to judge how sensible reviewercodswallopcomments actually are.And these strikethrough things are
great!