(or how to make inefficient use of your time by trying to please eight reviewers)

My modular RNA-Seq paper is finally accepted in Translational Psychiatry. Here is a figure in our paper if you want to take a peek at the framework:

It has been almost a year since 98% of this work was completed. In his 2015 blog post, my colleague @dhimmel analyzed publication delays of over 1.5 million articles. In his table of calculated median acceptance delay (days from receival till acceptance) for all PubMed-indexed journals, Translational Psychiatry showed 99 days:

Well, my particular study took 222 days -- is this a case close to the tail of TransPsych’s violin plot, or is the delay getting worse? In Daniel's follow up post, I was able to interactively enter Translational Psychiatry and see the trend, up until 2016:

I haven’t played with the code, but perhaps when @dhimmel is not giving talks or hiking, he could quickly rerun the analysis with more up-to-date data or delegate this task to his apprentice. For now, allow me to tell you how it took so long to almost-publish my modular RNA-Seq study.

First submission

My first submission of this work was to Biological Psychiatry on August 10, 2017. Early November, after having sucessfully defended my PhD dissertation (#blessed), I received feedback from 5 different reviewers. It bugged me that the editor did not ask for a revision even though the reviews were objectively very positive. We had the option of re-submitting to a completely different journal, repealing the editor’s decision, or transferring the reviews to another journal in the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium. After discussing with the co-authors, I decided to transfer the reviews to Translational Psychiatry, an open access journal in the consortium. You will see later why this was a wrong move. At the time, we thought five reviewers were a lot, but several comments were solid, constructive and significantly improved the manuscript.

Second submission

Right before my trip back to Viet Nam, I submitted the revised manuscript to Translational Psychiatry on December 4, 2017 after putting a lot of work in digging back into what I was doing 3 months before, reminding myself of many things I did, from data filtering to findings interpretation, adjusting to the new journal’s style, teleconferencing with co-authors, responding to all the reviewers, and getting all co-authors to approve the revision. Don’t get me wrong: the revision process was difficult but absolutely necessary; however, it could have been a lot less time-consuming had I not have to wait 3 months to get reviews. The end product was a higher quality paper and a 25-page long cover letter to the editor of Translational Psychiatry. We crossed over fingers and hope that the editor acknowledged our effort to improve the manuscript and either accept our paper right away, or perhaps request a minor revision.

We had high hopes. Four months later, on April 3, 2018, we received substantial revision request and feedback from three different reviewers, in additional to the five we had. I was infuriated. I wanted to do good science, not please reviewers. Nevertheless, I bit the bullet and completed yet another thorough revision to resubmit. (This process sucked balls - I was still getting my feet wet at Penn during this time.)

Third submission

I submitted the second round revised manuscript on April 30. After 1.5 months of having not heard back, the corresponding author sent an email to the editor to ask for updates. On July 20, we received a minor revision request from one of the reviewers. The other two were happy with the revision. (Thank goodness!)

Fourth submission

Exhausted, I quickly addressed the reviewer’s two concerns and submitted the new version the day after the request, Jun 21. Finally, on July 14, we received an acceptance letter from the editor. I’m expecting approximately 2 more months until my accepted paper appear in Translational Psychiatry.

Conclusion

This post was written mostly as an outlet for my frustration, so I apologize if I bored the heck out of you along the way. I’m just glad the study is finally (going to be) out for the world to see!

Until later!