Looking back on the review of a rejected paper we’re about to resubmit, it struck me that, judging by what the reviewers wrote, this paper should have been accepted. None of the criticisms actually address the research! They’re all petty matters, most involving the fact that we used manual segmentation and thus didn’t discuss automatic methods – but this is not a paper on segmentation; it’s on diagnosing galactographic features in unenhanced mammograms. One of the reviews even says it needs more citations (it has 8). There is, of course, no good reason to cite things that you did not use, but that’s what this is asking me to do.

With each new paper I write, my faith in science dies a bit. It’s not that it doesn’t work – it clearly does – but that all of the advancements you see around you are such an infinitesimal part of what would be possible if science were truly open-minded.

I think I might just take up a programming job when I graduate. I need to find some way to gain access to the scientific equipment I need if I’m to do that, however. I don’t know if I want to continue playing the publication game, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop thinking.