Since I got rejected from a journal last month I haven't been able to being myself to read the feedback. Am going to try and be brave and do it today...Forum support would be much appreciated (yes I'm a complete wimp)

((hug))

Good luck with it - I hate reading feedback of my work (don't deal with criticism very well!) so I can certainly sympathise. xx

Thank you!

I'm generally fine with 'feedback' but this feels different. The first cut is the deepest, and all that
Ok, I've read one. I thought it would be just be a couple of paragraphs of comments, but they have annotated the entire document. Generally seemed ok. A few 'interesting's! And a few 'weak''s. *Sigh*

Two more to go.

Man, it's horrible!

I'm reading one more then I'm going home.

Well done keep_calm. I know it's rough but just imagine how much scrawling you could do on their work! I usually rail against any feedback, then realise it's quite helpful once I've calmed down.

Have a nice night tonight and reward yourself for your bravery :-)

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Thanks again.

My supervisor just came in to the office and lurked behind me whilst I was furiously typing on here, to top everything off!

I haven't really been able to synthesize anything that's been said yet but I'm hoping that now I've skim read it and absorbed the worst bits I'll be able to sit down at some point and work through it properly.

Edit: I have spotted one ridicuolous comment though. I study late medieval and early modern literature and the reviewer has asked whether 'my choice of reading matter has influenced my vocabulary' because I use the word 'whilst' and apparently 'whilst' is archaic!! Ha ha.

Hey Keep_Calm, I know, feedback is horrible. My first paper needed quite a lot of revisions and had to be resubmitted and got accepted in the end, but it isn't nice to read all that stuff about what's wrong. I think it's even worse when the comments make no sense- one of my reviewers was clearly from a different field and didn't know the literature, so his suggestions were non-sensical, i.e. he/she was asking me to consider 'evidence' which was non-existent and so on. Because of this I couldn't respond to the comments except to say that they were inappropriate as the literature didn't exist in this field and so on, but when I sent it back the editor must have realised that the reviewer was a bit off topic because it was accepted straight away then, without going back out for review (which I was initially told it would do). Try not to let it get you down, it's hurtful but even the best researchers get papers rejected sometimes. If the comments are do-able then perhaps revise and send to a different journal? Best, KB

Be brave KC! And that's good you've started reading the comments. The comments on my first article made me just burst into tears. I had a good cry, a rant, put them aside for a while, thought about them and realised they were helpful, and they rewrote the thing. You can do it. It's hard, but keep going.

Thank you Sue and KB,

Last night was hard, I just kept going over and over the things that they'd said in my mind and couldn't seem to forget about it. So one good thing is that it's forced me to take a break, and I'm not going to do ANYTHING work-related for the next 3 days (my supervisor has been telling me to take some time off but I was too anxious).
KB, I will be re-submitting to a different journal at the end of the month. My sup is editing a special edition of a big journal and only 4 or 5 papers are going in. He really wants to accept mine as it looks good for him (rolls eyes), but all the other spaces have been filled by respected academics so obviously I am terrified, having read some horrible comments :-( Funnily enough the article was just an extended version of a paper I gave in January which was received really well...Clearly something went very wrong!
At least I understand the whole process now. Must start growing a thick skin,as I know these things happen all the time.

Hi Keep_calm, I'm glad you got the first reading of the comments out of the way. You're right, you do have to be brave to sit and take whatever they fire at you, but take heart in that usually what they say is likely to improve your paper. I had worse criticism from one of my supervisors than I did from reviewers for my first paper which forced me to grow a very think skin fast. I posted about it here somewhere, he can be really quite nastly when he wants to be. The two reviewers were very different inthe style of comments, one was extremely thorough with a fe pages of comments, while one gave just 2 paragraphs, so it does depend a lot on who the reviewer is and it's not necessarily always a true reflection of your work.
So take a break over Easter, enjoy your easter egg, try not to think about work and come back to it with a fresh mind, you might feel much better about it then :-)

The comments came back on that paper a paper I peer reviewed. I've noted some comments that another reviewer made about the paper. Nothing really constructive at all - just nastiness. Keep_Calm, I feel your pain. All criticism should be justified, encouraging and, at the very least, constructive.

The worst feedback I ever had from reviewers was on a paper I put together after my history BA, based on a substantial research project I'd undertaken (I'm a historian, and my final undergraduate course included a very large research project based on primary sources). The feedback was very bad. Maybe I tried too early. But I wasn't going to let it put me off trying again.

Enjoy your break Keep_Calm and good luck with your resubmission of the paper. Fingers crossed for you.

Keep Calm,

Thank you for being brave enough to actually post about this. On reading your post and answers, I realised I wasn't the only one who really cringed at reading criticism of my writing or papers-especially when it is via a public forum (not just between you and private individuals or sup). Not that I've published that much anyway but the thing is...it is really easy to believe that it is all you ('you' meant in general sense like 'one'-not as in you personally KC)
and there is something wrong (i:E hypersensitive or 'special') about you.

It is obviously really normal to have these worries. I hope that the sting from some of the criticisms has died back a bit and you are feeling fine again. And not to hijack your post (I can be good at that:$) but I found (in recently ended relationship with academic partner), the academic world could be incredibly bitchy- unbelievably so in the English faculties where he had been employed-but others as well. Not everyone-but certainly enough!

Don't let it stop you from anything!(up)

Hmm, this is something I'm not looking forward to about the PhD, I'm not great at receiving criticism, especially on something I've put a great deal of effort into. In one of my PhD interviews I got an absolute grilling about my undergraduate project where they just ripped to shreds everything I'd done - now I look back, I think they were just pushing me to see if I could be assertive and justify my choices and conclusions, but at the time it felt like a nasty, personal attack and I got a it upset and very defensive. Needless to say I failed the interview, though now I wonder if that was more because of my response to their criticism rather than because they really thought my project was bad or that I was a worthless person.

I guess it's important to remember that criticism and feedback is just part of how research works, everyone is subject to it, and we shouldn't take it too personally. That's a lesson I'll have to learn, anyway.