Finally good news!
In my previous post told how my Counterevidence paper was rejected after its two reviewers commented it lacking novelty and being of poor quality. I sent an appeal and after a bit over three weeks of waiting, my appeal was accepted! What this doesn't mean is that the paper itself was accepted. What I need to do is to rewrite the paper in a way that all of the points raised by the reviewers are addressed. This won't be a walk in the park, but I'm pretty confident that I can manage to convince the reviewers this time.
One of the reasons for this is that I've been in this situation before. Back in 2015 we found a simple way to make lignin nanoparticle. We submitted a manuscript to Green Chemistry, the best scientific journal in the field. It was rejected with one of the main reasons being lack of novelty. We showed that when lignin was of dissolved into an organic solvent and placed into a dialysis bag, and the bag placed into water, the inflow of water into the bag and outflow of the organic solvent out of the bag caused the otherwise water-insoluble lignin to form spherical particles that were stable in water. After someone had shown it could be done that easily, it seemed obvious. This a classic case of Columbus's egg.
Columbus's egg refers to a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. The expression refers to an apocryphal story, dating from at least the 16th century, in which it is said that Christopher Columbus, having been told that finding a new trade route was inevitable and no great accomplishment, challenges his critics to make an egg stand on its tip. After his challengers give up, Columbus does it himself by tapping the egg on the table to flatten its tip.
We weren't the first to publish a method to make spherical lignin particles. A group in China had realized this property of lignin when it had undergone a chemical reaction called acetylation. This was published in 2013, which had formed as a catalyst for us at Aalto to begin working on the topic. Or more specifically I was hired to Aalto as a consequence of it.
To cut a long story short, we had to do a bunch of extra experiments to bulk up the manuscript. After this, the paper was accepted at the end of 2015.
What happened next? Before this point, there had been 211 publications with the phrase "lignin nanoparticles". At the moment of writing this post, the Simple paper that we wrote has been cited for 462 times and there are 4530 publication with the phrase "lignin nanoparticles". If we do a plot of the number of papers citing "lignin nanoparticles" we see that there had been steady (possibly even exponential) increase in mentions of "lignin nanoparticles"in publications, but in 2016 there is clear jump in the speed of increase of mentions. If one were to cut some corners, one could say that without our paper there would be possibly 1000 papers with the phrase"lignin nanoparticles" instead of over 4000. Of course it might be that without us, someone would have noticed the same thing and the increase in rate would have just begun a bit later.
So what does it mean that a paper has had an influence in almost 5000 papers (and counting)? While not unheard of, this level of influence is extremely rare. As a comparison, I started working for my PhD in 2015 and in 2016 if had 13 citations to all of the papers I had publish thus far. At this moment, I have 1904 citations, almost all of the citations stemming from this initial discovery. And not just publications, it resulted in my startup company LignoSphere.
The next question is what will I change in the revised manuscript for the Counterevidence paper? In my last post I mentioned that the key to quantum phenomena are intermolecular forces. I 'just' need to prove that these van der Waals interactions are not caused by quantum mechanical phenomena, but rather that quantum mechanical phenomena are an emergent property of intermolecular interactions of strings comprised of elementary particles (dots) moving at the speed of light. Easy peasy.
It will take a while until the revised manuscript is ready, but much longer for the reviewers to give their comments. I'd be positively surprised if a second round of revision was enough.
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