Quantum Gravity Looking for Peer Reviewers

 Today’s post isn’t exactly about a major advancement in my process. Rather it’s about doing things the easy way. I’ve finally submitted the sneaky manuscript on Quantum Gravity to a journal that by its own admission only considers the technical soundness of the manuscript as a criterion for acceptance for peer review, not the perceived importance to the field. To some extent this is a major step down in merit, but honestly after the paper is accepted, no one cares where it was published, just as long as it has undergone rigorous peer review.

That is, I can’t submit the manuscript just anywhere. Submissions to papers that have a sketchy reputation with regards to peer review would have a major impact on the future credibility of the paper. Thus, the paper needs to be known as a reliable source of information.

Now the paper is in a decent manuscript, but definitely punching below its weight. The reason being a not so secret secret. The high impact factor of a journal doesn’t increase the number of citations for a paper too much over low impact factor one. Its role is not zero. Especially if there are multiple papers on a topic, people can choose which papers to cite. In these cases people often choose an article in a high-impact journal over an article in a low-impact one.

However, if there is a specific article that introduces an important nugget of knowledge, it must be cited over subsequent articles that repeat the information of the first one. Such articles can be cited for a ridiculous amount of times, regardless of where the article was published.

But I don’t care nearly as much about how many times mu article will be cited as I care that its content will be cited. If it happens that the theory is adopted rapidly, it is possible that the paper itself will not be cited as often as some other article that improves upon it.

So, what is currently taking place? The editor of the journal is currently

will review and assess your manuscript’s suitability for the journal, and may look for peer reviewers.

The first part of the sentence means that they don’t accept just anything for peer review. The editor can make a judgment call for the technical quality of the manuscript. If there is something clearly wrong with it, the editor can desk reject the manuscript, just because of that. What they cannot do is to respond like Nature did, with the text:

In making this decision, we are not questioning the technical quality or validity of the findings, or their value to others working in this area.

In this journal, if they are not questioning the technical quality or validity of the findings, the manuscript can progress to peer review.

There is still the possibility that the editor will ask for minor corrections in the formatting, but once these corrections have been made, the paper should be going to peer review. After this, it might take quite a while until the peer reviewer respond and the editor decides on the fate of the manuscript based on these responses. Oftentimes the first response from the reviewers is after around 1-2 months from submissions, but there is also a long tail. That is, some papers suffer from a much worse fate. This is actually what happened to me once.

Before this agonizing wait there is still also the wait to obtain peer reviewers. Before peer-reviewers have been assigned to the paper, there is still a possibility of a late desk rejection. That is, if all prospective peer reviewers say they won’t even accept the manuscript for peer review, the editor can choose after half a year to reject the manuscript without peer review. This is what happened to me before. But that was when my manuscript was about things that I didn’t have experimental evidence for.

This time things will be different, were the famous last words…

And this time I managed to prompt ChatGPT in just the right way. I asked: “can you draw me a picture of an editor of a scientific journal looking for peer-reviewers for a manuscript?” When it produced a decent template, but a comical bubble where the editor says out aloud “LOOKING FOR PEER REVIEWERS”, I changed the prompt to:

Perhaps instead of any text, you could have three thought bubbles with the faces of three scientists and scientific paraphernalia relating to wood next the faces, but inside the thought bubbles.

And this is wait I got: