Frustration

I like working at a university. I like solving problems without known solutions. I like improving existing solutions. I like working in my own directions. I like working with students. I like advising students with their work. I even like giving lectures.

However, what I don’t like, at least currently, is writing publications of my scientific results, which, of course, are the primary part in preparing a scientific career. This process ist currently awful, tiring and frustrating.

This year I wrote six articles. Each time I invested much work into preparation and presentation. However, *none* of them will be published this year. Not a single one. I never had such a bad year before. And from a realistic point-of-view, this is like a death blow for an accademic career.

Of course, this is not nice in itself, but what is even more frustrating are the reviews with which my articles got rejected. One of my papers hat numeric scores (1 = worst, 5 = best score) of: 4 + 4 + 3 +3. Also, the reviewer’s comments are sadly often nonprofessional, useless, and even polemic. Another paper was loved by two of the four reviewers. The third one found it borderline, but found it could be improved. The forth and primary one, however, worte something which I can only understand as “I don’t like it”. His review had more text but not much more contant than that. Result: rejected.

I had some discussions about this issue of an overcritical reviewing with several professors. All were aware of this problem and all agreed that this happens once in a while to a community. Sadly, in my opinion it has gotten continuously worse in the last seven years I have been working and publishing (except for this year) in the visualization community. Honestly, I don’t known what will be …