Hi, I am confused whether you have a similar experience. I received the rejection letter for my first paper submitted to a reputated journal. After a long time wating, to my suprise, the reviewer's comments look very aggressive and emotional for me. The review report is only one-page, but none of the comments are positive. For example, he said something like 'This is a very poor manuscript', 'it is poorly written', 'Even a diligent undergraduate student knows this.' I know my paper is not well-presented or well-organized, and was found a mistake which, in my opinion, is minor, although I tried my best to make it clear, and hope he can suggest me something to improve it. But his comments really shocked me. I understand the academic life is not so pleasant every time, but is it usual to receive a report like this?

These words don't seem that emotional or aggressive to me unless they are untrue. Reputable journals tend to have very high standards and you admit that "your paper is not well-presented or well-organized."If you think the review was in error, then ask someone else (one of your professors, for example) to look at your paper. But if you want to avoid negative comments, then the first step is to work on your writing and organization skills. Better clarity and presentation will give you a better chance of a good review unless the core idea of the paper lacks merit.Good luck!

QuoteIt now seems extraordinary that Black and Scholes had difficulty in getting their paper published (a paper that was to win a Nobel Prize). They submitted their work to the Journal of Political Economy for publication, who responded by rejecting their paper. Convinced that their ideas had merit, they sent a copy to the Review of Economics and Statistics, eliciting the same response. After making some revisions based on the comments of Merton H. Miller (Nobel Prize for Economics, 1990) and Eugene Fama they submitted their paper again to the Journal of Political Economy, who finally accepted it.

Thanks for your encouragement. It is not realistic to expect every report to be gentle, and all I can do is to try to make my work better. Please delete this post if necessary.

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaThese words don't seem that emotional or aggressive to me unless they are untrue. Reputable journals tend to have very high standards and you admit that "your paper is not well-presented or well-organized."If you think the review was in error, then ask someone else (one of your professors, for example) to look at your paper. But if you want to avoid negative comments, then the first step is to work on your writing and organization skills. Better clarity and presentation will give you a better chance of a good review unless the core idea of the paper lacks merit.Good luck!For OP it might be good to know what the Journal's expectations and standards are.And yer average reviewer might have had a bad day or be prejudiced against theory X because he is an aficianado of theory Y!

QuoteOriginally posted by: fmfreshmanHi, I am confused whether you have a similar experience. I received the rejection letter for my first paper submitted to a reputated journal. After a long time wating, to my suprise, the reviewer's comments look very aggressive and emotional for me. The review report is only one-page, but none of the comments are positive. For example, he said something like 'This is a very poor manuscript', 'it is poorly written', 'Even a diligent undergraduate student knows this.' I know my paper is not well-presented or well-organized, and was found a mistake which, in my opinion, is minor, although I tried my best to make it clear, and hope he can suggest me something to improve it. But his comments really shocked me. I understand the academic life is not so pleasant every time, but is it usual to receive a report like this?Yes. Either is your paper really crappy or it's too much out of the box. If it's your first paper, I am opting for the first option. Write some very conventional papers, best together with your supersisor and then try to publish new approaches. You must learn how to write a paper as well.To encourage you:QuoteOriginally posted by: PatThe SABR model got published in Wilmott (which turned out to be a very good decision!) because I got tired of arguing with editors of top-notch academic journals, who were telling me how fixed income desks operated in banks. Pointing out that I worked on a fixed income desk, and had a good take on how the other fixed income trading teams in NY operated, and which problems were important or unimportant to our trading teams, didn't dent their conviction of their own righteousness. Since I'm a practitioner, apparently I am automatically in either the unenlightened (if they are being nice) or "mentally slow" category. Maybe they're right. Maybe properly augmenting our sigma algebras with sets of exterior measure zero truly is the nightmare keeping our traders awake at night, and is going to engenger the next global financial crisis.

QuoteOriginally posted by: fmfreshmanHi, I am confused whether you have a similar experience. I received the rejection letter for my first paper submitted to a reputated journal. After a long time wating, to my suprise, the reviewer's comments look very aggressive and emotional for me. The review report is only one-page, but none of the comments are positive. For example, he said something like 'This is a very poor manuscript', 'it is poorly written', 'Even a diligent undergraduate student knows this.' I know my paper is not well-presented or well-organized, and was found a mistake which, in my opinion, is minor, although I tried my best to make it clear, and hope he can suggest me something to improve it. But his comments really shocked me. I understand the academic life is not so pleasant every time, but is it usual to receive a report like this?It is to be expected I am afraid.Getting a paper published only overlaps partially with actually doing the research. Sometimes the getting published bit is as much work as obtaining the results. The higher impact factor the journal, the more extreme this will be.For example to publish a paper in Science, the manuscript must be 5000 words with 4 figures. To actually achieve this in a manner that the referees find agreeable is very hard in itself (let alone when you factor in that the basic results have to be significant).I would not take it personally at all. Generally, even if they are annoying, referees comments are valid.Back in the days when I had to review papers I am afriad I used to get quite annoyed with sloppy submissions. I have probably said very similar things as your rewiever, although I was generally prepared to look at re-submissions if they committed to making some effort. There was one occasion where I rejected a paper outright because I didnt think the title actually matched the result (and the overall standard of the paper was terribly low).I dont think reviewers do this to be nasty. Its just that academics are usually pretty passionate about what they do. It is more a way of letting you know that this is not degree level anymore, where points are awarded for effort and turning-up. In research, you are not being taught anymore. When presenting your ideas you are doing battle. Its a signal that now credit is awarded for merit only. And that is not such a bad lesson to learn.You may even encounter the scenario that I once encoutered, where your paper is rejected on failry spurrious grounds by a rather senior academic (whose identity you have been able to figure out by the references they make in their comments), only to find several weeks later that a very similar paper comes out of their lab!You must have seen: of luck!

QuoteYou may even encounter the scenario that I once encoutered, where your paper is rejected on failry spurrious grounds by a rather senior academic (whose identity you have been able to figure out by the references they make in their comments), only to find several weeks later that a very similar paper comes out of their lab!Publish or perish.The 'result' can also be transferred by word of mouth. Look how they got the Nobel Prize for the double helix.

QuoteOriginally posted by: neuroguyYou may even encounter the scenario that I once encoutered, where your paper is rejected on failry spurrious grounds by a rather senior academic (whose identity you have been able to figure out by the references they make in their comments), only to find several weeks later that a very similar paper comes out of their lab!Then, what did you do to get your work back? I think it would not happen to me, because from the comments, the reviewer seems not understand the content of my paper quite well. Also, I have uploaded it to a reliable online source with time record before I submitted it, so it should be safe. Anyway, at least, I learn from his comments about how to make it more clear, and I am now trying to revise.

QuoteOriginally posted by: fmfreshmanQuoteOriginally posted by: neuroguyYou may even encounter the scenario that I once encoutered, where your paper is rejected on failry spurrious grounds by a rather senior academic (whose identity you have been able to figure out by the references they make in their comments), only to find several weeks later that a very similar paper comes out of their lab!Then, what did you do to get your work back? I think it would not happen to me, because from the comments, the reviewer seems not understand the content of my paper quite well. Also, I have uploaded it to a reliable online source with time record before I submitted it, so it should be safe. Anyway, at least, I learn from his comments about how to make it more clear, and I am now trying to revise.You misunderstand completely.Nobody 'stole' work. Not at all.But an inherent danger in scientific research is that other people are working on related or very similar problems. This is no surprise if you think about it for a minute (Newton, Leibniz; Lamark Darwin etc...)So its not that anybody stole any ideas. Its just that they were thinking very similar things. They also had a similar paper in press, so the 'opposing' team held up my paper to increase the impact of their own. Also by the time mine got published (in a different journal), I had to cite their work. This also made it look more like my work was a derivative of theirs.Its much more subtle than taking work or ideas.

QuoteOriginally posted by: neuroguyYou may even encounter the scenario that I once encoutered, where your paper is rejected on failry spurrious grounds by a rather senior academic (whose identity you have been able to figure out by the references they make in their comments), only to find several weeks later that a very similar paper comes out of their lab!indeed, often a rejection will occur for reasons such as that, or because your work while valid contradicts work the referee is planning to do. Or because you take a different approach which the referee feels cheapens his approachMy advice would be to send that if you and your colleagues think it is a good paper, send it to a different journal and hope you get different refereesThis won't always be the case (I was once asked to referee a paper written by some chinese guys by a journal and a number of paragraphs in the introduction were verbatim from an old paper of mine. I rejected on those grounds: I laid out what I had written and that they had copied sections word for word).Six months later, I was asked by a different journal (this one was based in china but in English) to referee the paper which had not been changed since the original submit. I sent the journal a copy of the referee's report I wrote for the first journalOne bad abuse of refereeing I heard of supposedly happened to an engineering prof at mcgill in montreal (I was told by a different engineering prof at mcgill). There was a local bigshot heart surgeon who had a unique heart bypass surgery method, the engineering prof did a computer simulation and showed that everyone who had it would die because gunk would build up, the surgeon was one of the referees, and the paper never saw the light of day

And then plagiarism of a whole book for monetary benefit happened to my work in 1998.

and of course things like this can and do happenGLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS COVERED UP SCEPTIC'S 'DAMAGING' REVIEW

It's not unusual for me to receive two reports one very enthusiastic and one very negative. Get used to it or don't try to publish.

QuoteOriginally posted by: mjIt's not unusual for me to receive two reports one very enthusiastic and one very negative. Get used to it or don't try to publish.Two from the same journal? I find a bit opaque understanding the amount of reviewers ex ante... I came from a field where 3 was the norm, but in finance sometimes there is just one.Is it considered bad practice trying to recontact the editor with a detailed explanation on why a review was meaningless and the reviewer did not understand this and that? Last time I got really silly notational nitpicking, and thought the review process was also meant to fix such irrelevant (not just minor) oversights... In general one would just resubmit elsewhere, but what when there are just 5 journals in a field, and most of them are not adequate for practice-oriented material?