An Ode to Reviewer #2: You Complete Me (And Then Reject Me)

O Reviewer #2, you cryptic sage, Your wisdom fits upon a single page — “Major revision. Unconvincing claims. The authors clearly don’t know what explains The variance in their Table 3. Also: have they considered [Cite: Me, 2023]?”

I have considered you. I have considered you at length, at 2 AM, three days before the camera-ready deadline, while your comment box glowed on my monitor like a small administrative sun. I have considered what it means that you require my Figure 4 to be “clearer” without specifying in which dimension clarity is currently lacking. I have considered whether “the contribution seems incremental” is a substantive critique or a sentence you use the way a rubber stamp uses ink.

A Profile

You are, statistically speaking, a professor. You accepted this review request in a moment of goodwill and subsequently forgot about it for eleven weeks. You then opened the manuscript on the Sunday evening before the deadline and read it with the focused attention of a person who has four other papers open in different tabs, none of which they are reviewing at this moment either.

You have not read the related work section, except the parts that do not cite you. Those parts you have read carefully.

Your Methodology

You begin with a compliment: “The paper addresses an interesting problem.” This compliment functions as anesthesia. It is the last kind thing that will happen.

You then enumerate concerns in decreasing order of legibility. Your first concern is substantive: a missing baseline, a questionable assumption, a result that does not replicate under the experimental conditions you are imagining. This concern is fair. We will address it, though it will require three weeks of additional experiments that will produce results directionally consistent with our original claim.

Your second concern references a paper that was published after our submission date. You expect us to have read it.

Your third concern is that our writing could be “tightened.” This is the academic equivalent of “you could dress better.” It is not wrong. It is not helpful.

Your fourth concern is that the title is “potentially misleading,” and you would like us to reconsider it. We have spent four years with this title.

In Appreciation

And yet, Reviewer #2, I need you. The system requires you. Your skepticism, however expressed, has on occasion prevented genuinely bad ideas from entering the permanent record. The paper you rejected in 2019 was, in retrospect, not ready. You were correct, even if your method of being correct involved four bullet points about the limitations of our evaluation protocol that could have been summarized as “your evaluation is limited.”

I look forward to submitting this revised manuscript, which now includes your self-citations. I have cited them enthusiastically. I have called your 2023 paper “seminal,” which is perhaps generous for a workshop paper, but I understand the currency in which we are trading.

Yours in perpetual revision,

A. Author

The author declares no conflicts of interest with any reviewers, anonymous or otherwise. This claim is approximately accurate.