Friday, May 27, 2011

Letting papers go

Awhile back, a colleague and I wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal. The first round of reviews came back, and one reviewer told us our work was fatally flawed.

We went through a few rounds of back-and-forth with the editor, all the while repeating that Reviewer #7* was mistaken because of such-and-such reason.

Recently my colleague and I were examining our resubmission. My colleague drew a picture to clarify something, and I stopped dead in my tracks. "Holy crap, Colleague. Reviewer #7 is right! Our entire paper is irrevocably flawed."

We went though the data, checked a few things, and sure enough - fatal flaw. I'm not sure how I missed it the first time, I guess because I was not the first author and busy doing other things when we first submitted it.

So - 30 page paper goes in the trash. Clunk!

Now you might say, "But wait! Why can't you just fix that broken part? Write a big disclaimer within a limitations section?"

I can't fix it because it's wrong. The entire concept of the paper is flawed. Even with a disclaimer it would be disingenuous to publish this at all.

So I let it go. I'm not too sad, though. We actually re-designed how we'd do things to avoid this flaw in the future, and I am sure our next paper will be super fantastic when we write it. And in any case, there are always more great ideas out there.

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(*) Not the Reviewer's actual number. 

5 comments:

  1. Perhaps it would be useful to publish (at least in a TR) why your result was flawed. If it wasn't so obvious to you and your coauthor, perhaps publishing the flaw would help other people avoid similar problems.

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  2. It is always painful to get a really negative review. Your experience reinforces that after getting over the emotional response, it is really important to think about what the reviewer said and whether they have a point or not.

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  3. Thanks for doing the right thing and not publishing bad science, just to get another line on your CV. I wish more people would follow your example.

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  4. A similar thing happened to me with a single-author paper on a pet topic of mine when I was early on the TT. Receiving that review was quite unpleasant but after the initial fury passed and I gave it some serious though I really had to admit that the referee had a point. This episode got me thinking a bit more deeply about certain issues with the approach; as a result, the paper ended up significantly reworked and much better overall when I submitted it anew many months later. It was published after a smooth review process and is now well cited.

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  5. Hey there software engineering lady, I browsed around your blog and couldn't find any mentioning of where are you from, and where did you study for your degree. I'm rather interested in that profession and I lack useful information about learning it.

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