Getting Published in Quality
Journals
Dealing with Reviewers’ Comments
Simon Pierre Sigué, Ph.D.
Athabasca University
Contents
• Publish or perish
• Institutional imperatives of scientific
knowledge
• Reviewers or gatekeepers
• Expectations
• Some realities
• What to do with reviewers’ comments
• Remarks
Publish or perish: The
rationale
• Academic tenure and promotion
• Economic considerations (wages, grants,
and research funding)
• Professional recognitions and awards
• Various other benefits including personal
accomplishment
Institutional Imperatives of
Scientific Knowledge
• Universalism: knowledge-claims are to be
subjected to pre-established impersonal criteria
• Organized skepticism: knowledge, whether new
or old, must always be scrutinized for possible
errors of fact or inconsistencies of argument
• Desinterestedness: scientists should have no
personal stake in acceptance or rejection of
data or claims
• Communism: intellectual property is a heritage
held in common
Merton (1973)
Reviewers or Gatekeepers
• Accept or reject knowledge claims prior to
entering a discipline’s published record
(Bedeian 2004)
• Influence the career advancement of individual
scholars (Baruch & Hull 2004)
• Set the scientific standards of a discipline
(Bedeian et al. 2009)
Expectations
• Possess the scientific expertise necessary
to judge the significance of peers’ works
• Be open to innovative research that can
effectively advance knowledge in the
discipline
• Be objective
• Free from conflicts of interest
• Prepare timely critique that is helpful to
both an editor and a manuscript’s authors
Some realities
• Reviewers do not always meet the
expectations (According to Feldman’s (2005)
estimate, 25% of reviewers’ comments might
be wrong, overstated, or off point)
• Publishing new theoretical ideas in scientific
journals is a well-known challenge (Hitt
2009)
What to do with reviewers’
comments
• Rule 1: Always be thankful. Someone has
finally taken time to read your manuscript and
offer you his or her opinion
• Rule 2: Comply with reviewers’ comments if
you can live with them and you want to be
published. (25% of the 173 lead authors of
articles published in AMJ and AMR from 1999
to 2001 reported that to placate a referee or
editor they had actually made changes in their
manuscripts that they felt were incorrect (see
Bedeian et al. 2009))
What to do with reviewers’
comments
• Rule 3: If you cannot comply with reviewers’
comments when you are given the opportunity
to revise and resubmit, politely explain why…
“ As far as I know, consumer promotions are promotions designed to consumers,
by either manufacturers or retailers (pull promotions). Retailer promotions are trade
promotions designed by manufacturers and directed to retailers (push strategies).
The two cases studied by the author consider that promotions are controlled by the
manufacturer (model 1) or by the retailer (model 2). In both cases, the kinds of
promotions used are directed to consumers.”
There may be several definitions of retailer promotions in the literature… To avoid
any confusion on what I call retailer promotions in this paper, I have now included a
clear definition of this term in page 5 of the manuscript. Several other authors,
including Gerstner and Hess (1991) and Blattberg and Neslin (1993) who surveyed
this literature a few years ago, will agree that retailer promotions are retailercontrolled promotions that target final consumers.
What to do with reviewers’
comments
• Rule 4: Keep improving your manuscript and
take it to another journal if you are denied the
opportunity to revise. After all there are several
journals in the market…
Staelin (2008): “we sequentially submitted our paper for publication to three major
economics journals (American Economics Review, Bell Journal of Economics—now
the RAND Journal—and the Journal of Industrial Organization). Each time the
paper was rejected. The main reason given (if I remember correctly) was that there
was nothing new, and in any case it was not particularly relevant to the journal’s
readership. Undeterred, we began working with a Ph.D. student and published a
variation of our basic model in an AMA Summer Conference proceeding
(Doraiswamy et al. 1979). The discussant on this paper was even harsher than the
three different review teams, saying that our model was too abstract and that our
conclusions should be totally disregarded (…) Consequently, I suggested to Tim
that we revise our paper and submit it to Marketing Science. The rest is history.”
Remarks
• Reviewers do their job; You do yours;
Nothing should be personal
• After all, if you are published, the fame is
all yours… You can however
acknowledge reviewers’ contributions