论文小修后被拒稿的理由分析

Dear XX:

The other referee has not sent a report, in spite ofseveral reminders. I decided therefore to make my own referee’s report in thehope of bringing this long process nearer to an end. I regret to tell you thatI have recommended rejection with the possibility of resubmission after majorrevision. I am sure that you will be disappointed with this decision, so let meexplain why I made it.

Firstly, from your letter responding to the referees’comments, I saw that you had adequately addressed only about half of the pointsraised by the two referees. The other points had been either misunderstood orrejected. Please consult my referee’s report to see which points weremisunderstood and which were rejected. Rejection of referees’ advice isallowable, but very good reasons for rejecting it must be put forward. Youfailed to advance good reasons. This was especially obvious when the advice was to transfer Figures 2and 4 to Supplemental Information, or to do the same to Table 1 or tomake it more compact. The reasons that you gave only confirmed me in my viewthat those display items should have been transferred.

Secondly, you will see in my report that I raised fourbroader points related to the referees’ comments. They were: (i) the lack of aconsistent hypothesis in your research, (ii) the difficulty in establishing thesubcellular localization of N-terminally modified proteins and their modifyingenzymes, (iii) the poor discussion of your own data, which caused the refereesand me to call for much of your data to be removed to Supplementary Information,and (iv) the need to avoid excessive speculation.

If the Editor-in-Chief endorses my recommendation, andif you decide to resubmit the manuscript after another major modification, Ican see three ways forward for your manuscript. Firstly, you can greatly shorten it to focus on datapermitting a novel, reliable and valuable conclusion. Secondly, you canput much more effort into extracting meaningful conclusions from your data andhence justify its inclusion in the journal. In either case, be certain toconfine any speculation to the Discussion (omitting it entirely from theAbstract, Results, Figures and Tables). Thirdly, you can actually conduct the experiments that will remove the need to speculate about subcellularlocalization, enzyme function, and so on.

I wish you success in whatever you decide to do. Bestwishes,

XXXX, Editor, Plant Cell Reports.