- Email: [email protected]
Surely, You Jest
EDITORIAL BRUCE J. HILLMAN, MD
Surely, You Jest Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. —Lewis Carroll
One thing about this job is that I get more mail than I did with the other 2 journals I edited. People seem to think that I have some inside track on how to make their manuscripts publishable in JACR (that’s my job), how to fix their manuscripts so they will be publishable somewhere (sometimes I can), or how to change radiology publishing so it fits the ideal (a frustrating and impossible task). Sometimes I receive just a simple existential cry for help. The following is an excerpt from an e-mail sent to me by a reader, exemplifying the last genre concerning a review he received from another journal: While a few of the reviewer’s comments are reasonable, none of them will change the findings of the study. Furthermore, many of the comments make no sense or demonstrate the obvious ignorance of the reviewer. I’ve been at this business a long time and still find it very aggravating to get this type of review in which I’ll need to waste several more hours editing or refuting the reviewer’s comments.. Why are we wasting our time on meaningless changes? The reviewers need to be better
educated about how to review and the editors need to do a better job of editing the reviewers. In the words of Bill Clinton, I feel your pain. Because I have no cogent reply, I invented the following whimsical scenario for your consideration. (Setting: The rundown, seedylooking editorial offices of the medical imaging journal A Medical Image Is Worth a Thousand Words.) (Action: An editor wearing a green visor alternately glances through a review of a dog-eared manuscript and looks up at a Canadian curling match on a poorly tuned television. His editorial assistant files the nails on her polydactyl hands. The 6 knuckles on her left hand are prison-tattooed with letters spelling “R-E-J-E-C-T.” “M-I-S-L-A-I-D” graces the seven digits on her right.) “Hey, Gracie, get a load of this letter I got back from an author. He’s complaining about the request for revisions I sent him. He says the reviewer’s comments are ‘solipsistic pettifoggery.’1 Whaddya think he means by that?” Gracie stops her nail filing and gives the editor a disdainful look. “What’a ya think he means? He’s telling you it’s a pile of dog poo.” “Oh.” The editor hesitates a couple of beats. “So, what’a ya think I oughta do?” I cribbed the phrase “solipsistic pettifoggery” from a tweet issued by Saurabh Jha, MD (@roguerad) on April 1, 2015. 1
Gracie rolls her eyes. She languidly blows on the knuckles of her left hand, then gives him a thumbs down. “No, really, Gracie, I’m serious. We gotta come up with something. The poor guy responded to all of the reviewer’s comments. Here’s this one where he says, ‘The reviewer asks us to explain the differences between our results and those described in the paper by Schmedlap. We are unable to do so except to say that we have every confidence that we are correct. We have added a sentence that says so in the text.’ That seems as good an explanation as any to me.” “Yeah, it’s a good explanation if you’re a total narcissist,” Gracie opines. She uncrosses her legs to slide down from her perch on the counter, saunters over to the editor, and, at point-blank range, again waves the knuckles of her left hand across the editor’s face. “Ouija board or Magic 8 Ball?” the editor asks. Gracie flips him the black sphere resting on the counter. Eyes closed, the editor shakes the ball for what seems like an interminable period of time, then opens his eyes and reads aloud, “Outlook not so good.” “The Eightball never lies,” Gracie says smugly and returns to her nails. “I don’t know,” the editor remarks. He strikes a key that sends a computer peripheral into action. “I’ll send him another set of these randomly generated reviewer’s remarks and see how he responds.”
The author has no conflicts of interest to disclose. Bruce J. Hillman, MD: 13129 Adona Lane, Wake Forest, NC 27587; e-mail: [email protected].
ª 2015 American College of Radiology 1546-1440/15/$36.00 n http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2015.04.007
651
Surely, You Jest Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. —Lewis Carroll
One thing about this job is that I get more mail than I did with the other 2 journals I edited. People seem to think that I have some inside track on how to make their manuscripts publishable in JACR (that’s my job), how to fix their manuscripts so they will be publishable somewhere (sometimes I can), or how to change radiology publishing so it fits the ideal (a frustrating and impossible task). Sometimes I receive just a simple existential cry for help. The following is an excerpt from an e-mail sent to me by a reader, exemplifying the last genre concerning a review he received from another journal: While a few of the reviewer’s comments are reasonable, none of them will change the findings of the study. Furthermore, many of the comments make no sense or demonstrate the obvious ignorance of the reviewer. I’ve been at this business a long time and still find it very aggravating to get this type of review in which I’ll need to waste several more hours editing or refuting the reviewer’s comments.. Why are we wasting our time on meaningless changes? The reviewers need to be better
educated about how to review and the editors need to do a better job of editing the reviewers. In the words of Bill Clinton, I feel your pain. Because I have no cogent reply, I invented the following whimsical scenario for your consideration. (Setting: The rundown, seedylooking editorial offices of the medical imaging journal A Medical Image Is Worth a Thousand Words.) (Action: An editor wearing a green visor alternately glances through a review of a dog-eared manuscript and looks up at a Canadian curling match on a poorly tuned television. His editorial assistant files the nails on her polydactyl hands. The 6 knuckles on her left hand are prison-tattooed with letters spelling “R-E-J-E-C-T.” “M-I-S-L-A-I-D” graces the seven digits on her right.) “Hey, Gracie, get a load of this letter I got back from an author. He’s complaining about the request for revisions I sent him. He says the reviewer’s comments are ‘solipsistic pettifoggery.’1 Whaddya think he means by that?” Gracie stops her nail filing and gives the editor a disdainful look. “What’a ya think he means? He’s telling you it’s a pile of dog poo.” “Oh.” The editor hesitates a couple of beats. “So, what’a ya think I oughta do?” I cribbed the phrase “solipsistic pettifoggery” from a tweet issued by Saurabh Jha, MD (@roguerad) on April 1, 2015. 1
Gracie rolls her eyes. She languidly blows on the knuckles of her left hand, then gives him a thumbs down. “No, really, Gracie, I’m serious. We gotta come up with something. The poor guy responded to all of the reviewer’s comments. Here’s this one where he says, ‘The reviewer asks us to explain the differences between our results and those described in the paper by Schmedlap. We are unable to do so except to say that we have every confidence that we are correct. We have added a sentence that says so in the text.’ That seems as good an explanation as any to me.” “Yeah, it’s a good explanation if you’re a total narcissist,” Gracie opines. She uncrosses her legs to slide down from her perch on the counter, saunters over to the editor, and, at point-blank range, again waves the knuckles of her left hand across the editor’s face. “Ouija board or Magic 8 Ball?” the editor asks. Gracie flips him the black sphere resting on the counter. Eyes closed, the editor shakes the ball for what seems like an interminable period of time, then opens his eyes and reads aloud, “Outlook not so good.” “The Eightball never lies,” Gracie says smugly and returns to her nails. “I don’t know,” the editor remarks. He strikes a key that sends a computer peripheral into action. “I’ll send him another set of these randomly generated reviewer’s remarks and see how he responds.”
The author has no conflicts of interest to disclose. Bruce J. Hillman, MD: 13129 Adona Lane, Wake Forest, NC 27587; e-mail: [email protected].
ª 2015 American College of Radiology 1546-1440/15/$36.00 n http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2015.04.007
651