A successful first CARAS Webinar
22 March 2020
— Dr. Carolyn Meeker
On March 21, 2020, Eighteen people participated in the inaugural webinar with Dr. Sagarin, professor of social and evolutionary psychology at Northern Illinois University and Research Team Leader in The Science of BDSM lab, who shared valuable insights regarding the peer review process of journal publications.
A central part of today’s webinar focused on decisions made by the action editor: Accept as is (very rare), Accept with Minor Changes (great, small changes), Revise and Resubmit (may require significant changes), Reject (fatal flaw, low impact), and Desk Reject (not for this journal, too narrow). Such decisions are based on feedback from reviewers who were asked to provide (hopefully) constructive feedback about the manuscript.
Dr. Sagarin had several recommendations for responding to Accept with Minor Changes decisions:
Make the changes.
If you do not want to make a change, pick your battles. You can explain why in a cover letter sent with the updated manuscript.
Write an extensive cover letter detailing responses to the feedback. Think sandwich effect: praise the feedback, explain how you addressed the feedback, and thank the editor and reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.
Do not simply submit the manuscript to a different journal without making changes given the feedback. Consider this an opportunity for improvement. Also, keep in mind that reviewers often serve on multiple editorial boards and are known within their field. Your manuscript might be reviewed by the same person, for different journals.
Only submit your manuscript to one journal at a time.
Thank you Dr. Sagarin for an excellent walk down the path to publication!
Join us for our next CARAS Webinar on April 11, 2020 – Drs. Anna Randall and Richard Sprott on Kink Clinical Practice Guidelines - An Overview.
To register for the next CARAS Webinar:
https://forms.gle/2yUg7RV5PEgJn6NRA
Carolyn Meeker, Ed.D. | she, her, hers
Director, CARAS Mentoring Program
CARAS - Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities