It happens all the time of course. Your good science is rejected following peer review at a journal that you think should have accepted it. It can feel like a punch in the stomach. But it shouldn’t. Here’s what you should do:
I give myself 24 hrs to decompress before I read the reviews again in detail. This time I’m not reading the reviews from the standpoint of why the referee felt that my manuscript definitely didn’t belong in Journal Y. Rather I’m looking for positive clues about where the referee thinks the work might be better suited. This would also be the time to seriously consider whether the work in question needs to be repackaged (i.e. put together with other experiments/figures).
But it’s important at this phase to put the referees’ comments in context. Perhaps there was another agenda at play. Perhaps they didn’t understand parts of the manuscript. Perhaps the editor picked the wrong reviewers. All of these are possible.
You then need to decide whether to flip the article (i.e. change the format and submit to another journal) or repackage. Obviously there are many factors that need to be thought about at this stage. I’ll only say that very often flipping is appropriate–and doesn’t get considered enough. If you really believe in the manuscript *and* if your trusted colleagues do also, then very often flipping to the right journal can be the right choice.
Now, how to decide on the right alternative journal? We’ll talk about that next post.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 