This week I was asked to review a paper that I had seen before. It had been sub­mit­ted to a jour­nal a few months ago and I had writ­ten a detailed report describ­ing some prob­lems with the paper, and not­ing a large num­ber of typos that needed fix­ing. That jour­nal had rejected the paper, the authors had sub­mit­ted it to a sec­ond jour­nal, and the paper ended up on my desk again for review. I was inter­ested to see what the authors had done about the prob­lems I had described. Alas, noth­ing had changed. Not even the typos. It was iden­ti­cal to the pre­vi­ous ver­sion with every error still there. So I sent the same report off to the sec­ond jour­nal advis­ing the edi­tor of the situation.

I’m not sure what the authors imag­ined would hap­pen. It is not uncom­mon for a paper to be sent to the same reviewer after it has been rejected by one jour­nal, espe­cially when the field of poten­tial review­ers for some top­ics is quite small. This paper was on an exten­sion to the auto­matic time series mod­el­ling pro­ce­dures pro­vided in the fore­cast pack­age for R. Since I am the author of the fore­cast pack­age for R, the prob­a­bil­ity of me being asked to review the paper is approx­i­mately one.

In gen­eral, always lis­ten to review­ers, even if the paper has been rejected by the jour­nal that sent you the reviews. While you are not obliged to respond to every­thing in a review when you are not send­ing a revi­sion back to the same jour­nal, you should think about what has been said and revise the paper accord­ingly. At least fix the typos! If the same review­ers see it again, they won’t be happy if you’ve ignored them. Also, they may just have some use­ful com­ments that will lead to improve­ments in your paper.

Related Posts:

• Estab­lish­ing priority
• How to avoid annoy­ing a referee
• Writ­ing a ref­eree report
• Why ref­eree?
• Should you make your work­ing papers public?