Wednesday, January 7, 2009

If at first you don't succeed...

..so we just got informed that the deadline for submitting a revised version of a manuscript to a good journal is fast approaching, and that the Editor welcomed our submission provided we answered all the reviewers' comments and met all their demands.

This would've sounded real good if it wasn't for said demands requiring ALL of the experiments to be redone in order to perhaps gain some complementary information which would only be fit to include if it supported the already existing data. In case it didn't support the existing data, the additional technique in question would not be powerful enough to debunk existing data. If we re-work the data completely and remove 1/3 of the data set and scope, it STILL means way more work than what is sensible to put into a study which has proven to be highly reproducible both with respect to trends and absolute values.

So we're finding another journal. In a way, we're taking a page outta' the business philosophy of Scott Adams. Specifically, we've taken to heart a Sunday strip titled "Bob the dinosaur gives wedgies to corporate people who deserve it", where a "marketing genious" talking about market segmentation being key gets a wedgie and the message "Don't improve the product - find dumber customers."

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