Results of High Impact Paper Review

Well I just got my a** handed to me by high impact paper reviewers. I guess I should have expected that. I mean its not like you submit to the highest journal in the land and everyone starts bowing before your academic greatness. And, I admit that when I submitted I thought it was a maybe not a definite yes or anything, but when it went out for review my hopes were lifted and...ah well.

I must say the reviewers were very good. They raised some great questions about the science that we didn't address. Some of these can be easily fixed, but others are thornier. That is where the real problem lies. They contend that even if we answer the questions, the result will be a less high impact paper. They basically disagree with our premise that this is awesome because it solves problem X. They were like yeah you might have solved X (although we're not completely convinced with the data you have), but we don't think X is such a big problem anyway.

Comes at a bad time too. The student working on this is on vacation for the holidays, so new data will not be quickly forthcoming. It will probably be a month or more before I can turn this around for a different journal. Depends on how much additional data we collect (or can collect). Oh well, I guess I'd rather have my a** handed to me by Journal of Awesome Science than Yeah, you tried that but we new it would work anyway.