By Claire Aitchison
I was stuck recently in a conundrum – ready to submit my carefully worded review of a manuscript for a well know scholarly journal, but uncertain as to whether I should tick ‘major’ or ‘minor’ revision required. And this isn’t the first time I’ve found this decision difficult. What might be considered a minor revision for one person, could be major for another.
In this particular example, my request didn’t require more than a small paragraph of additional writing, plus some well-placed rhetorical sentences. In that sense I was looking for a relatively minor change to the text – the article didn’t need major rewriting or restructuring. There was nothing inherently wrong with the paper. The author had a really interesting and valuable contribution to make. They had a sound argument and had nominated appropriate theoretical and methodological frames, and they had great data.
In essence I had two requests: I was asking for some clarification about the methodology which could be satisfied in one or two sentences. A relatively small ask if the author was familiar with the nominated method. My second request was that they explicitly integrate the theoretical frame they claimed to be using in their data analysis. Now, if the author wasn’t really familiar with the theory, then in order to respond to this criticism, they would need to do some new reading and thinking. In this case, therefore, they would need to undertake some major work in order to prepare the revision – even though the revision itself may only be altered by some couple of hundred words.
So back to my role as a reviewer – do I tick the box for Major or Minor revision required? I checked the ‘Instructions to reviewers’ and found the information there less than useful for helping me make the best choice. The problem, as I saw it, was that relatively minor textual changes were required, but depending on the knowledge and rhetorical dexterity of the author, achieving these changes may be a major task.
Now there’s another aspect to this that, in a perfect world, shouldn’t impact on reviewer decision making … but I suspect often does. In most of the journals I review for, if the submission is deemed to require only minor changes, then the reviewer isn’t expected to reassess the resubmission. MMnn, you know where I’m heading with this – by ticking minor changes required, I can save myself another couple of hours work … and that’s a pretty seductive option for any already overburdened academic.
What would you have done? Have you been challenged by similar or other or reviewing conundrums?
Nice to know that reviewers fret about this!
I received a review that asked for a complete restructure, as we’d not used the correct template (we’d done a case study, which had different headings to a standard research study). They called it ‘minor revisions’! The big problem for us was minor revision have a one month turnaround, while major revisions allowed three months. It was one crazy, stressful month getting it done!
Hi Emma,
Eek, that does sound full on! Glad it turned out OK. Your story reminds me of another ‘pet’ frustration of mine – ie the process whereby you wait for months to get your work reviewed, then after returning it, you wait months again for the response, etc etc … and then, one day you receive notice to correct and return proofs within a tiny 5 day window! (Pity if you are away, sick or on leave!) But, we do love it when it finally gets published. 🙂
Hi Claire,
I had a roughly similar experience when reviewing an article. It was a good article, well researched and a good strong argument, but there were a couple of lines throughout the article that made some very strong claims that seemed to be based on a personal and political opinion which were not part of the central theme and I thought they undermined the main thread. As a reviewer I questioned whether they should be in there and asked the author to either elaborate on their significance to the article or to delete them. Another draft came back to me and other changes had been made but these very strong personal opinions where still there. At that point, it was really just a concern for the reputation of the author as the article was good and these points did not really detract from that – but they would have been noticed.
It gave away too much of the author’s personal bias and while I could have pressed the point and asked for further revisions, I decided to express my concern about these points and leave it up to the author as to whether they should include them or not.
I suppose as a reviewer I thought that my job was done insofar as the article had been reviewed and was worthy of publication and an author’s reputation is his/her own to forge.
Yes, thanks for this story. It isn’t always straight forward, but I really like your approach to determining when to comment and when to let go. Beaut!