The Obvious Rebound

Three years ago, today, I wrote a blog post titled “That’s Obvious”. It’s about the feeling you get when you read or hear someone belabor proving a point that seems obvious to you. Reading the Educational Psychology article prompting that post made me more circumspect – the first paragraph quotes another author who stated: “A great many of psychology’s principles are self-evident. One gets the uneasy feeling that we’ve been dealing with the obvious but did not know it.” I had not professionally experienced the receiving end of “that’s obvious”, and so my previous reflections were about how I’d respond when such thoughts popped into my head.

Until now.

A recent manuscript of mine went through two rounds of review. In the first round, one of the reviewers argued that for the reaction scheme I was presenting, I needed to clearly show my calculations for the standard “canonical” pathway – the one that an arrow-pushing organic chemist might expect to see. Due to methodological challenges (that I won’t delve into), I had not done this as clearly as I should have; instead I had focused too much on explaining those challenges and told two stories without weaving them together sufficiently. Sometimes reviewers make unhelpful suggestions, but not this time. After ruminating on the long and challenging (yet ultimately helpful) review, I made some major additions to the manuscript to show this pathway. It took a while, but I was pleased that I felt the paper was much improved compared to the original.

In round two, a different reviewer who had not seen the original manuscript negatively reviewed my paper essentially with a “how obvious” argument that I hadn’t shown anything new. No one had previously done the calculations to tease out the reaction pathway intermediates – and I made arguments as to why many of them would be difficult to observe – but the conclusions were unsurprising for the standard pathway that I had now weaved together from two different methodological approaches. Reading the review, I was at a loss of what to do next. The reviewer’s suggestions were not germane to the paper, in my opinion. Sometimes reviewers make unhelpful suggestions.

Actually, it was only the next morning that I recognized the “how obvious” argument. Rebound! (Sleeping on things can be helpful.)

I began crafting an informal letter to the journal editor explaining the issue as constructively as possible without sounding defensive. The editor was sympathetic to my argument, and I proceeded to put together the formal response. In my response, I cited the Educational Psychology article (the first time I’ve cited a non-chemistry-related reference) to defend my manuscript. Thankfully, the manuscript was accepted, and did not require a third round of reviews. If it had not been for the blog post I wrote three years ago, I’m not sure I would have been able to craft a good response, as I might have quickly forgotten the one among hundreds of articles I had read that year.

Is there a take-away lesson? I haven’t been as disciplined writing my blog the past five months. Maybe I need a rebound!