Hi guys!

There are quite a few posts at the moment about reviewers and how to deal with their comments, and I was just wondering if anyone had had a similar experience to my own?

I submitted my first paper and got a revise and resubmit decision (I was actually quite pleased- I was dreading a straight rejection!). I was able to respond to the first reviewer's comments and found them helpful and made a few changes. Yet the second reviewer's suggestions were difficult to address. I had assumed that the reviewers would be 'experts' in the field (as stated in the editor's email!), or at least to have done research that was clearly related to the papers they are asked to review....but this reviewer obviously had very little knowledge of the field or existing research and his/her comments were therefore inappropriate and impossible to respond to (my supervisor agreed with me on this- I wasn't just being awkward!). For example, they suggested that I widen my inclusion criteria to include research that hasn't actually been done (it was a review paper) and to add in further details of other non-existent research etc...

In the end it wasn't a problem, I responded to the comments and explained why I couldn't make the suggested changes and my paper was accepted without further changes or another round of reviews. As it was my first paper I have little experience of the review process, but how much knowledge do reviewers generally have of the topics they are being asked to review papers on? I know there might not be experts on the exact same things that we are currently studying but I thought they would have more background knowledge than that! What has anyone else found?!

Cheers guys, best wishes to all, it seems to be a stressful time for a lot of people right now, myself included!

KB

Hiya,
reviewers are only human too and editors know this. If you can say why you are not going to incorporate (some of) one reviewer's recommendations but show reasonable and willing about other changes this will give you a very good chance of it getting published. It helps to put yourself in the editor's shoes- they need to select papers to publish and rely on peer review to do the selection and some enhancement and will forward all their comments but they will use their own judgement on how much is needed in the end. Hope that helps...

The very first PGR tips I wrote was on peer review... http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/PGR_Tips_Issue_19_May08.pdf
Tennie

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I also got a revise and resubmit decision on my first paper and was rather surprised/delighted in the beginning about that, since I had somehow assumed they would simply reject it outright. I was also quite flattered that the corrections they wanted were rather minor indeed -- but then this quite pleasant feeling changed into sheer panic, as I realized the reviewers didn't scrutinze the paper very much and that was actually one major reason why I submitted it -- to get some thorough and detailed feedback, as my supervisor is quite disinterested in what I do and I'm pretty much on my own.. so I was rather terrified in the end by the superficial reviewer comments, fearing there'd be major flaws in it that they didn't check which will then be everlastingly connected to my name :-( !

I'm a bit more relaxed about it now, thinking that most people probably won't read it anyway...

I guess my point is that I think I idealized the whole peer-review thing, it probably has a lot less to do with "quality-control" than I naively assumed... I guess for that it's better to have a network of people who you trust academically that are willing to comment on what you do.. and then weigh the reviewers comments against your own network's comments...