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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Submitting to a Scientific Journal


I thought I would share with you what happens after you have submitted your research to a scientific journal.

First you need to make sure you submit your research to the appropriate journal or you get the big, REJECT. I submitted my Master’s research to a dance medicine journal about four years ago and got rejected partially because I was stubborn and didn’t want to make any changes and partially because the editor wanted me to edit my discussion section down to crap, then I submitted it last year to a high profile journal and got REJECTED because it wasn’t complicated enough for them, so I finally submitted it to a more friendly performing arts journal and it got accepted with minor revisions. I am waiting now to find out which issue it is going to be in.

I submitted my female dancer survey to above mentioned dance medicine journal and heard back that they are accepting it with major revisions. You may think this is good, but it really is just time consuming. I got a list of what the reviewers wanted me to change. What is a reviewer? A reviewer is someone that reads your research to see if it is good and acceptable for the specific journal. Typically it is someone who does research in a similar area, however I have heard that the editor of this journal is just picking people to be reviewers who are not really specialist or have the appropriate background to be reviewers. Depending on the journal it would be two to three reviewers per paper and the journal can decide how long to back log. Also, the reviewing process is blind, so I don’t know who the reviewers are and they don’t know who wrote the paper. These are some of the questions/comments I got asked with my red answers:

What is the point of the Tsung and Mulford reference?
We wanted to include this article as even though it is a case study because it is the only neck injury in a ballroom dancer in all the literature.

There is an obvious lack of basic knowledge of Dance Sport (e.g., the ISDF is the predecessor of the WDSF (changed name June 19, 2012).
ISDF was changed to WDSF on 19 June 2011. We are assuming that the readership has no knowledge of DanceSport, so we are keeping it basic.

Line 40: "Since competitive couples train together, their training duration is equal; however, their dancing techniques are gender specific…” That is not correct. It is only valid for a few dances in that genre. Please describe or correct.
This is correct in International Modern technique, but could be incorrect in other styles of DanceSport.

Line 42-49: If this study is on efficiency-orientated dance sport, what role does the aspect of selection play? Would couples manage to dance on this level without sufficient movability of the spine, etc.?
This paragraph is about how other authors have described International Modern technique. 

The discussion needs to be completely revised. There are numerous aspects that do not apply to the issue and that are partly inaccurate or wrong medical interpretations.
We are medical experts, please be specific as to what you think is medically inaccurate.

Line  227-232: That does not belong in the discussion. The calculations are not clear.
Please be specific of what does not belong in the discussion. Those are not calculations, they are ages.

References: should be updated
Please be specific as to which references should be updated.

I think you get the idea that the reviewers (specifically #2) thought they were an expert in DanceSport, but obviously have not read all the research on DanceSport.  My professor made a comment once how newly graduated PhD’s are usually tougher on students who are defending their thesis/dissertation. This is probably the case with this reviewer as well, where this might be the first time they have reviewed a paper for a scientific journal and they are being tough on me.

Now I am waiting to hear back from them if more changes need to be made or when it will be published.

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