Authors' response to the Editor

Humanity

CJEM 2002;4(1):54

Dear Editor,

Enclosed is our latest version of Manuscript #83-02-22-RRRR, that is the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in the details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems, and sexual frustrations, by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths that you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they would probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death.

Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four of the five people we suspect of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as reviewer C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited.

Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

Our perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions 13 through 28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is if you ever bother reading the reviews before writing your decision letter), that reviewer B listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. There were a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author; presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be widely cited. To handle this we have modified the introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled, "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these authors submits to your journal.

Assuming that you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it, but you forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it without your input.

Author unknown*

*This delightful piece arrived as an anonymous email. It expresses well the frustration that authors feel when they submit manuscripts to journals other than CJEM.