In our August “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:
I was hoping to get some advice, or maybe just a discussion about a troubling side effect of the enormous length of time papers are under review.
On several occasions now I’ve had a situation where one review report takes much, much longer (on the scale of several months) than the other, and it affects the subsequent dialogue in response. E.g.:
1) Paper submitted in March
2) Reviewer 1 submits review in two weeks.
3) Second reviewer (who admittedly may have been secured later than Reviewer 1) submits review in mid-August – R&R granted.
4) Since the reviewers raise deep, substantive concerns, I work hard on the response and substantially re-write the paper, resulting in a response to R&R in early November.
5) Reviewer 1’s response to my response reflects impatience with delay or a change in the dialectic (“As I wrote early this year…”; “A now forthcoming paper from X raises this point…”).Is there anything that can be done to avoid what seems to be a sense of resentment on behalf of Reviewer 1 that they are being dragged back to a long-forgotten or slightly out of date paper?
Any helpful thoughts from readers?
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