What is a major revision?

Admin
2012-04-09

I posted a little while ago on a proposal for a fast statistics journal. It generated a bunch of comments and even a really nice follow up post with some great ideas. Since then I’ve gotten reviews back on a couple of papers and I think I realized one of the key issues that is driving me nuts about the current publishing model. It boils down to one simple question: 

What is a major revision? 

I often get reviews back that suggest “major revisions” in one or many of the following categories:

  1. More/different simulations
  2. New simulations
  3. Re-organization of content
  4. Re-writing language
  5. Asking for more references
  6. Asking me to include a new method
  7. Asking me to implement someone else’s method for comparison

I don’t consider any of these major revisions. Personally, I have stopped asking for them as major revisions. In my opinion, major revisions should be reserved for issues with the manuscript that suggest that it may be reporting incorrect results. Examples include:

  1. No simulations
  2. No real data
  3. The math/computations look incorrect
  4. The software didn’t work when I tried it
  5. The methods/algorithms are unreadable and can’t be followed 
The first list is actually a list of minor/non-essential revisions in my opinion. They may <em>improve</em> my paper, but they won&#8217;t confirm that it is correct or not. I find that they are often subjective and are up to the whims of referees. In my own personal refereeing I am making an effort to remove subjective major revisions and only include issues that are critical to evaluate the correctness of a manuscript. I also try to divorce the issues of whether an idea is interesting or not from whether an idea is correct or not. 

I’d be curious to know what other peoples’ definitions of major/minor revisions are?

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