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Academic humor....


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Alright, this one's been around for awhile, but is absolutely hysterical.

 

I'm a firm believer in the ability to laugh at one's self. I've had 3 articles accepted for publication this year and two more are in the review process now....I know it very well....

 

For those that have published, y'all know that the review process is incredibly painful. I've had reviewers demand changes to a manuscript, only to revise it, send it back in, find out that it is now being sent to different reviewers, and then get a recommendation to make changes that would often be back to the original manuscript.

 

One article was revised a total of 5 times........ugh.

 

That being said, I am also a reviewer for 3 different journals, so I can certainly understand the other side as well, some of the simply bad writing that is submitted is really astonishing....like you want to say....."really, this is the best you can do".

 

As I said, you have to be able to laugh at yourself....this was actually published in 2000 as a comedic relief from an unknown author. I would like to shake their hand.

 

http://eloquentscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Frustrated_author.pdf

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 be cited 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.

 

There's more at the link......I still laugh when I read this....

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