The Editor’s Royal Flush

Lately, I’ve been seeing quite a few manuscripts sent out for review that receive one of the following sets of reviews:

• reject, accept, major revisions

• reject, minor revisions, major revisions

I guess these are the equivalent of a royal flush in cards, although I’m not sure the result is as hoped for by the author!

I used to be amazed at how three reviewers reading the same paper can come to three entirely different conclusions. In particular, how can one author recommend rejection when others see the value in eventual publication after revisions? Now, after being an Editor since 2004, I have hundreds of papers worth of experience, and it makes more sense.

Reviewers are humans and suffer from the same human aspects as others.

Some see the value in the work; others may be motivated by envy or maliciousness (although, thankfully, few of these happen).

Some reviewers are thorough and capture all the weaknesses of the paper in their review; others are inexperienced or not knowledgeable and miss crucial weaknesses in the papers.

Some reviewers have no problem rejecting a weak paper; others would prefer to be more supportive and encouraging and provide feedback to make it publishable.

For all these reasons, getting a royal flush in your reviews is more common than you may think.

For more discussion of how Editors make decisions, see my paper:

Schultz, D. M., 2010: Are three heads better than two? How the number of reviewers and editor behavior affect the rejection rate. Scientometrics, 84, 277-292. doi: 10.1007/s11192-009-0084-0. [PDF]

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