Huh?

Got reviews back on an article I’d submitted along with a friend/colleague to an asthma journal.

The reviews shredded the article. They questioned the value of the work in the first place, the methods we’d used to approach the work, and the conclusions we drew from our results.

The editor sent it back with a “revise and resubmit”.

Huh?

Usually revise and resubmit means “we want to publish it but have to give lip service to our reviewers.” I conclude that either the editor didn’t agree with the reviewers, or they’re really hard up for material these days.

As you can tell, I didn’t have a lot emotionally invested in this article – I sent it in expecting a reject. So even a shredding followed by an invitation to resubmit has exceeded my expectations.

More relieving, when I screwed up the courage to look at my advisors comments for the paper I actually DO care about, they’re… manageable. I was terrified he’d say he really didn’t think the underlying idea had value, but in fact he seems to have enthusiasm for the basic precept and simply made (generally worthwhile) comments about wording and presentation. Whew.

You know, this academic stuff is a pain, but it sure beats working for a living.