And this is what frustration can do to you: A letter from a frustrated author to a journal paper. The amusement is guaranteed (I laughed so much).
Dear Sir,
Madame, or Other:
Enclosed is
our latest version of Ms. #1996-02-22-RRRRR, that is the re-re-re-revised
revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire
manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the g-d-running head!
Hopefully,
we have suffered enough now to satisfy even you and the bloodthirsty reviewers.
I shall skip
the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response
to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your anonymous reviewers
are less interested in the details of scientific procedure than in working out
their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of
demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over
hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches.
We do
understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your
editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they were not
reviewing manuscripts they would probably be out mugging little old ladies or clubbing
baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the
most hostile, and we request that you not ask him to review this revision.
Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being
reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them, the review process
could be unduly delayed.
Some of the
reviewers comments we could not do anything about. For example, if (as C
suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species,
it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and
the paper has been improved and benefited. Plus, you suggested that we shorten
the manuscript by five pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively
by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a
smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.
One
perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions 13-28 by reviewer B. As you may
recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before sending your
decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite
in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had
any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the
Spanish-American war from a high school literary magazine. The only common
thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom
reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle
this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of the relevant
literature, a subsection entitled ``Review of Irrelevant Literature'' that
discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine
suggestions from other reviewers.
We hope you
will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently
deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous,
depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May
whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes.
If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom
throughout this process, and to express our appreciation for your scholarly
insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you;
please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to this
journal.
Assuming you
accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help
with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the
way we originally submitted it, but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads
and forced us to chop, reshuffle, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general
convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We could not or would not have done it without your input.
Source: http://marialuisaaliotta.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/when-publishing-gets-tough-letter-from-a-frustrated-author/
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