I have had a tough paper on the go, it is the sort that drives you up one wall and down the other. Now this paper is from a designed study. A designed study normally takes an couple of afternoons to analyse. Not this one. I have probably spent a couple of weeks on it. We are at least on out tenth round of analysis. Indeed we sent of the paper to a journal knowing there were problems with it but also knowing we were going around in circles analysing it.
It was rejected. Well no real surprise there! However we got the reviewers comments back.
I should explain we have an expert on the topic who conducted the study but she is not writing the paper. She probably thinks it is too simple. The thing was we were having to classify people after they had been recruited to analytic group. This was although we deliberately went to recruit people with specific characteristics we found that people were unstable between recruitment and the trial. That is they swapped groups.
What happened was one of the reviewers comments stood out. It suggested an analysis we had not done and this was after we thought we had analysed data every which way. We did it and the analysis popped out with the results just as we felt they should. No playing, no cludging, straight there in broad daylight.
You see the reviewer had two things:
1)Distance, we had got too close to the data and could not see the wood for the trees
2)Wider Perspective, we were too narrowly focused on the design of the study and how to analyse it. The reviewer was able to say basically "now X might well be interesting" and put his/her finger on the one thing we were overlooking.
So to reviewers who spend the time to give useful review, thank you! Even when you do not recommend acceptance!
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