Personal drama in academic peer review: Story 5 – Genital mutilation paper under review for two years
Personal drama in academic peer review: Story 5 – Genital mutilation paper under review for two years
Appears in this episode
In Story 4 of my personal experiences with ideological drama in academic peer review, we learned how incompetent and biased editors and reviewers slow the review process. This then delays findings, which go against their beliefs, from being published. We also learned of the increased tendency for such delays to occur when the research in question deals with sex or gender. In the case of Story 4, the total review time for our simple survey study was 1.5 years – an unacceptable length of time for peer review. Yet, this is not the longest amount of time that one of my papers on a sex or gender issue has been under review. That honour goes to the International Journal of Human Rights.
On June 29, 2021, I submitted, to the International Journal of Human Rights, a paper that reviewed use of the phrases “male circumcision” and “female genital mutilation” in biomedical research articles. I also summarized the existing data on why parents choose to have these procedures performed on their children. I argued that because (a) parents choose these two procedures for mostly cultural or social reasons rather than medical reasons, (b) both procedures involve significant alteration of a child’s genitalia, and (c) “circumcision” is a benign medical term, whereas “mutilation” is a term loaded with value judgment, that the frequent use of the phrase “male circumcision” rather than “male genital mutilation” reflects a gender bias against males.
My paper sat under review for several months without an update. On August 6 and then again on October 22 of 2021, I emailed the editorial office asking for an update on the paper. I was provided copy and pasted responses about how the peer review process can sometimes take a while.
By the end of March 2022, I still had not heard back about my paper. So, again I emailed the editorial office. I was then informed that the journal was trying to identify reviewers for my paper, as some reviewers had declined to appraise the manuscript. The editorial office asked me if I knew of any persons who might be willing to the review paper. On April 1, I sent the assistant the names of six individuals who I thought might be willing to reviewer the paper.
On May 15, I still had not received the reviews, so I again emailed the editorial office. In emailing, I provided the names of eight other individuals who I thought might be interested to appraise my work.
On May 26, an associate editor reached out to me, confirming that the researchers I had listed originally had all turned down the opportunity to review the paper. The associate editor then said he would have a look at my most recent list of suggested reviewers, which I had sent to the office two weeks earlier.
Then, in one of the strangest coincidences in my scientific career, on June 29, 2022 – exactly one year from the day I originally submitted my paper – I received the first round of reviewer comments.
Two reviewers had appraised the manuscript. Both reviewers supported publication of the paper. They requested only relatively minor revisions. So, I addressed their minor concerns, and on September 1, 2022, I submitted a revised version of the paper to the journal.
You might think that because I had to wait one year to receive the reviewers’ comments, and because their concerns were relatively minor, that the remainder of the peer review process would be expedited. That is, within a matter of days, the editor would look at the minor edits that I made to my paper and simply accept the paper for publication there on the spot. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The editor sent the paper back out for a second round of reviews.
Six months later, on February 9, 2023, I received the second round of comments from the reviewers. Remarkably, the editor appeared to have sent the paper out to two different reviewers. I cannot be certain of this because the reviews were anonymous, but the type of feedback provided makes me think that this was the first time that the reviewers had seen the paper. For an editor in this situation to send a paper back out to review to two new reviewers is ridiculous; it is something typically not done for a paper that requires only minor revisions and for a paper in which identifying the initial reviewers was a struggle. Finding two new reviewers would help to explain why it took six months to hear back. Nevertheless, I now needed to address the minor concerns of one of the new reviewers.
On February 24, 2023, I submitted a revised of the paper to the journal. At this point, you might think for certain that they would expedite the acceptance of the paper. I had undergone two rounds of reviews with four different reviewers, all of whom agreed that the paper should be published. Up to this point, the process had taken one year and seven months. Yet, it still took the editor another month to officially accept the paper. Thus, the paper’s official acceptance date was March 23, 2023, and for anyone who might be interested to confirm this history, they can look on the title page of the published paper. Next to the abstract, they will see a note labelled “article history.” In that note, the “received” date is listed as June 20, 2021, and the “accepted” date is listed as March 28, 2023. However, though the paper was accepted on March 28, it did not appear online until April 20, 2023, which is two months shy of being two years from when I originally submitted the paper.
Over this approximate two-year period, I probably sent the journal’s editor and editorial office 20-30 emails asking for clarifications and status updates about my paper. The handling of the paper was unfair to me, and it reflected incompetence at the editorial level. It was an excruciating experience. To add to the frustrations was the fact that during the long review process, I could see the editor regularly commenting about science and politics on Twitter. This was occurring at the same time that I could see, via the publisher’s submission portal, that my paper was sitting in the editor’s inbox. Thus, he had the time to get to my paper but chose not to.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that the topic of the paper was a key reason why the editor handled the paper so poorly, why he and his associates sent it out to two different sets of reviewers, and why it took the paper so long to get the final editorial nod of approval. Throughout the review process, I wanted to call the editor out for his incompetence and inconsiderate behaviour. But I held my tongue. I knew that I had four positive reviews on my side. I also knew that given the “controversial” nature of the paper, I might struggle to find another journal that was willing to review it.
Ultimately, my patience paid off. The paper was eventually published under the title, “‘Male circumcision’ and ‘female genital mutilation’: why parents choose the procedures and the case for gender bias in medical nomenclature.” According to the journal’s website, the paper was their most read paper in 2023, with over 8,000 views, nearly three times as many views as the second most viewed paper. The editor has yet to tweet it out.
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