Revise and Resubmit

We need two "signature pieces" for a tenure case. These are articles that every person on the divisional committee reads. They are also the articles that go out to external reviewers who write letters for our case. There are all sorts of unofficial rules about these pieces: they can't be from our dissertation, they shouldn't really be co-authored (unless perhaps the co-author is our student who didn't do much of the work), they can't be book chapters. They should ideally be solo authored journal articles in strong journals, and should make a significant contribution to the field.

I have been writing my signature pieces this year and last. I'm in the middle of writing my second one. I sent my first one out in September to our field's top journal. It is hard to get into this journal; the acceptance rate often hovers between 5% and 10%. So sending something out to this journal is a risky venture, but the payoffs are big, because publications in this journal are widely read and well respected, generally.

Anyway I finally got a decision back today, 6 months later. The decision is R&R which means "revise and resubmit". This lives sort of halfway in between an accept and a reject. It means that the reviewers had major concerns or things to fix, but they (or the editor) thought it was a good enough paper that if those things could be fixed, then the paper should eventually get published. So you are invited to revise the article to fix the problems, and then resubmit it, and the editor will have it reviewed by a subset of the original set of reviewers and usually a few new ones as well. The chances of getting a paper accepted after this process are higher than for initial submissions.

In graduate school I got the impression that an R&R is a very, very bad thing. So when I got my first R&R, I too was very upset. I was conditioned to see an R&R as a big failure.

However, I have gotten a number of R&R's since then. And what I've learned is that a) they're common, b) they mean you have a decent chance of eventually getting the paper published. I remember one time I got an R&R and I mentioned it to a colleague and she said "Wow, congratulations!" And I was like, huh? It's a good thing? It's funny how expectations can shape how you react to something.

Most of the papers I've published have been published after getting an R&R the first time. The revision process is good because reviewers' comments will help make the paper better and stronger. I believe in this process, but of course it's also daunting to start out the revision. Each time I do it, I look at the list of things to fix and it seems huge and daunting. In this case it will certainly require a serious revision. But I think it is doable. Interestingly, out of the 4 reviews, 2 of them recommended accept, 1 recommended reject, and 1 recommended R&R. My papers usually review this way -- the reviews typically span the gamut. The editor has the final decision.

The main frustrating thing about an R&R is the timeline. It took 6 months for this paper to get reviewed. Say I am incredibly fast and can resubmit it in, oh, 1 month. (That would be unrealistically fast, I think). Say it takes another 6 months. Even if it gets accepted in that case, that's 13 months between the initial submission and the acceptance. Then it is several more months before it is actually published. The incredibly slow timeline of these papers can be difficult and risky when you need publications for tenure. Especially at this stage in the game, for me.

Anyway, realistically, I was expecting an R&R. I was hoping for an outright accept, but to get that on the first try with this journal would be amazing. It's only happened to me once. I didn't really think lightening was going to strike twice. I was hoping it wouldn't get rejected. So this is generally a good outcome, if I'm patient. I think my strategy will be to revise this paper as quickly as I can and resubmit as soon as possible, then return to my other signature piece to get it written and submitted, hopefully sometime this summer. After those two extremely-high-priority tasks are done, then I can turn more attention to other stuff that needs to simultaneously happen, like a co-authored book chapter we're writing right now, and the two additional books I agreed to co-author for the NCTM series.

I think that all I need to do is a bunch of hard work, which is doable. I can handle work. It seems maybe possible to get it all done. We'll see. I'll probably start working on the revision tomorrow.