Getting Published in Quality Journals Simon Pierre Sigué, Ph.D. Athabasca University Dealing with Reviewers’ Comments

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 retailer- controlled 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