Writing a scientific article is a long process – you collect the data, you calibrate them, process them and you analyze them. You plot them, think about them, discuss them, think about them again until hopefully, at some point, the data give you results that you can understand and – publish. So you write the paper – in between meetings and teaching you somehow manage to squeeze your outstanding results and neatly prepared figures into the template provided by the journal. Then you submit – and forget about it all until you hear back from the editor three months later: the REVIEWS are back… sometimes it’s like this:
i.e. you quickly find out that your results were not that outstanding and your figures not that neat… the reviewers have filled page after page with “Did you consider…”, “why didn’t you calculate…” how does this compare to..”, “can you really ignore the effect of….” and “you ought to refer to the paper by mr so and so”…so you start over, you do all the extra analyses that reviewer three asked for, you make new figures, you clarify and expand and include a citation of mr so and so (the reviewer?). You read and write the text over and over and at some point you realize that you’ve done all that they ask for… and that version 6.2 of the paper is indeed much better than version 1.0. So you write a very polite letter to the editor, where you respond to each and every comment from the reviewers and explain what you’ve changed – and then you resubmit. And you wait. Again. For three months.
… but then sometimes, you get three short lines from the editor stating that you paper is accepted! It will be published!!! YES!!!
I received one of these e-mails the other day – and once the paper get online in a couple of days I’ll let you know what it is all about!