Doing the Revisions

Abstract

Many inexperienced researchers get discouraged and/or lazy when their paper is sent back with a long list of criticisms and an ambiguous cover letter from the Editor. Sometimes, they give up and simply submit the same (unchanged) manuscript to another journal. That is usually a bad decision, because an opportunity to improve and publish the paper (with the previous journal) is thereby lost and the new journal is unlikely to offer a more positive assessment. A paper is not “done” until some journal actually publishes it, and part of the work for every paper is making revisions after peer review. Virtually no manuscript ever gets accepted as is on the first submission [1–8]. So no matter how good your paper is, the reviewers will find at least a few details that should be improved. More likely, they will find a long list of substantial deficiencies in your manuscript. But if you are lucky, they will be insightful, specific, and constructive about how the paper should be improved. Revision often requires a substantial amount of time and effort [3]; (especially when insufficient time and effort was invested before submission). But the process of review and revision should increase the quality.