It’s not Always the Third Reviewer: Beyond-the-Call-of-Duty Edition

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not always the third reviewer that gives you grief. In our case, it is the one and only reviewer that shot down a manuscript, because at the very least, s/he would have expected (and I quote) an “analytical derivation of the estimator”. For some odd reason of his own, the editor, instead of simply rejecting us, dared us to do just that, and against all odds, we succeeded after some months of gently banging various heads against assorted walls.

Needless to say that on second thought, the reviewer found the derivation “interesting but unnecessarily complicated” and now recommends relegating the material to a footnote. To make up for this, s/he delved into the code of our software, spotted some glaring mistakes and recommended a few changes (actually sending us a dozen lines of code) that result in a speed gain of some 600 per cent. This is very cool, very good news for end users, very embarrassing for us, and generally wrong on so many levels.

Bonus track: The third reviewer.

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