Tuesday, June 19, 2007

R & R

No, not "Rest & Relaxation" -- perish the thought! No, in this case, "R & R" stands for that most ambiguous of readers' reports on an article I submitted: "Revise and Resubmit." It's better than "Thanks, but no thanks," but a far cry from "Accept, with revisions." What it means is that the readers have some suggestions as to how to improve the article, but that the revised version will have to go through the regular review process again, with no guarantee of acceptance.

The good news is that the reports were generally positive, and the suggestions were understandable: The journal is thematic, rather than a medieval-specific publication, so I need to add some more context and explanations to make the whole thing more comprehensible to nonspecialist readers. Most of this is the work of a few days: add a sentence or two here, translate a term there, explain what my sources are, and why I've chosen them. But one of the readers wants me to engage with the scholarship from non-medieval scholars, to show why non-medievalists should care. Again, for a nonspecialist journal, this is a reasonable request, but it means that I'll have to do a month or so of reading to add one to two paragraphs.

Yet, it's a good journal, so I think I'm going to do it. Wish me luck.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck. No footnotes. Did they say "No GD footnotes in your next try"? **grin**

Notorious Ph.D. said...

Actually, this round of revisions will require me to add footnotes. It's the Humanities, Chimpy. Footnotes are what we do.