how to deal with unkind journal reviewers?

[profjackster]

Hello All,

A few years ago I submitted an article to an education journal regarding the MOOCs phenomenon (massive open online courses). In the article I highlighted the pioneers of this method, but was critical of the promised utopianisms that such an educational platform sloganeered, especially by the information technology sector that is ever more aggressively moving into curriculum design. I concluded that MOOCs represented an evolutionary, not revolutionary learning platform.

Two of the three reviewers were fair and suggested a revise and resubmit for publication. The third gave my work a hatchet job and explicitly called for the paper's rejection. The anger was so visceral and vitriolic--the person was basically name calling me (e.g., making "straw man arguments"; "red herring"--and these were the nicer terms, etc.)--that I simply wrote the editor asking them to again reread the comments by this person. I argued that I would not be surprised if this person was one of the progenitors of a MOOCs learning platform I had evaluated and was critical of, and I noted that were the journal to include this person's diatribe and hostility as a valid set of criticisms to reject my paper, then the journal will be seen by me as having regressed in quality. To my surprise, the editor agreed with my mention of the third reviewer's vitriol, and recommend my work be published upon revising according to the other two favorable reviewers.

profjackster

[Myword]

StrawMan arguments and red herrings are informal fallacies, not nasty terms. If you commited these fallacies, then they should be changed. Of course, the reviewer could have been mistaken. Often when readers disagree strongly with an argument, they look for and find fallacies, even if argument is all right.