There is one principle taught in business schools that struggles to find footing in the world of academic publishing: convergent feedback.
In business, if you create a product and 9 out of 10 people tell you the handle is too small or the color is wrong, you fix it and try again. But if 9 out of 10 say it’s good and they’re buying it, you quickly scale up your production and give your business a chance to thrive. In academic publishing, however, the idea of convergent feedback usually seems foreign:
When you submit a manuscript and receive feedback from three reviewers, you often find zero convergent feedback: one reviewer finds everything acceptable but feels that the font must be changed to purple—”it looks better on white.” Another has not problems with the font color but argues your work should be rewritten in the form of haiku poetry, not a lengthy prose. The third dismisses both font and poetry as non-issues yet demands you replace all long words with short ones (they studied Hemingway in grad school).
In STEM, requested revisions are much harder to address: a single reviewer can mandate months of costly, exhaustive experiments, which may involve developing entirely new methods or introducing new model organisms. Sometimes, these experiments are essential to justify your claims or exclude experimental artifacts. But sometimes you do all this work just to replicate some previous experiments and findings. Or worse—just to satisfy a subjective whim: “I want this text in purple”.
So here we go: you make your text in purple—which other reviewers find odd. You also change the words to shorter ones—although many of them do not rhyme very well. And you delete a few essential blocks of text because they do not fit haiku. And then you resubmit. The work now looks somewhat odd, but everyone is happy: the reviewers are pleased you took time to understand their comments and address them obediently; the editor is happy the reviewers are happy. You are now okay to proceed to publishing your work that looks like Greek chimera—after someone young in your lab just spent several precious months of their life in this exercise, where the quest for scientific excellence is mixed with an unhealthy dose of unadulterated people-pleasing.
On a practical side, there is a good solution to this. As writers, we can now publish our work as a preprint—where we can express our ideas and findings as is and without needless delays. And as reviewers, we can always ask: ” Are my requests essential—or will they just add months of work for needless polishing?” We can also kindly reject work that lacks merit, where findings are not novel or conclusions are not justified—but we must, as a community, stop this unhealthy habit of demanding needless perfectionism. We need to stop this unhealthy habit of looking at solid studies– and requesting more experiments just for the sake of this ingrained tradition of asking for more.