On being edited

摘要

The process of having a paper reviewed and possibly edited may not be especially pleasant; it often involves painstaking work, but it should be informative, interesting, possibly generous and certainly not distressing. For every author, their submitted paper is a labour, perhaps of love, that they wish to have nurtured, respected and hopefully admired. Reviewers should respect that, but have a duty to the Journal and to hand surgery to critique the paper probing for weaknesses, especially ones that can be corrected, and to highlight all the issues that need to be addressed. Barton (2012) has written about this wisely.