Submitting your manuscript to yet another journal is bad for my mental health

One particularly annoying aspect of doing reviews for learned journals is that assignments tend to arrive in clusters. Six months ago, I found myself in a bit of a pickle, with loads and loads of requests arriving within a short time. And just five weeks ago, another volley of invitations to review hit my mailbox within the space of hours, in one instance within minutes, which looked suspiciously like a flaw in the matrix. As these systems are fully computerised, automated and increasingly urgent reminders are now clustering in my mailbox, too.

This morning, I came around to read the first two of them, only to realise that I had already read and rejected them during the last campaign, when they had been submitted to other journals. As I would have done in their stead, the authors had addressed some minor points but left the basic structure as it was then, meaning that I could basically cut and past my old reviews of them. Something like this has happened to me in the past, but with a single manuscript and a two-year hiatus between those incarnations I reviewed. Getting this twice in a single morning is a little creepy. Now I’m looking forward to my afternoon reading.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.