In our March "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
A paper I am working on has been rejected by a journal, despite two positive reviews. One reviewer gave me excellent, very helpful suggestions for improvements which I have now made in the revised version. If the paper ultimately gets accepted somewhere, I think this person deserves an acknowledgement and if they read the published version will see that I took up their suggestions. Will it look bad to thank an 'anonymous reviewer for Journal X' in a paper published in Journal Y? Maybe my concern is pure egoism and not wanting people to know it was previously rejected, but is there any etiquette on this?
Good questions, and I've recently wondered this too. I often thank reviewers in my papers, but I'm not sure that I've ever published a paper in one journal and explicitly thanked referees from another one. I suspect one can sort of do whatever one wants here, but I too am curious: is there a particular etiquette here?
I think referees of previous submissions (sometimes) deserve to be thanked. So I wrote a paper about it (and thanked referees that reviewed the paper for another journal). The paper is open-access and can be read here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/theo.12310
Posted by: Joona Räsänen | 04/28/2022 at 09:22 AM
There have been recent discussions about this at DailyNous.
https://dailynous.com/2020/05/07/citing-referees-journal-rejected/
https://dailynous.com/2021/03/10/citing-the-referees-at-the-journal-that-rejected-you-part-2/
My take: There's nothing wrong with thanking referees at other journals, but it's not the norm and people don't expect it. A simple and often satisfactory solution is to thank "anonymous reviewers" instead of "anonymous reviews at [journal that published paper]".
Posted by: Tyler Hildebrand | 04/28/2022 at 09:33 AM
There is a possible risk in thanking referees at other journals when the publishing journal is recognized to be superior than the journal(s) whose referees are thanked (and perhaps also when the journals are of roughly equal prestige). The risk is being perceived as intimating something like the following to the non-publishing journals: 'you passed on this paper, but as it's forthcoming in a better journal (or perhaps, 'equally good'), you made as mistake in failing to recognize the paper's merit'.
This may be a small risk, but I think it exists. (I've not read the Räsänen paper yet, and don't know if this objection is addressed.) Since the referees are nevertheless thanked (under a less determinate description) if one goes the Hildebrand route, that's the one I prefer.
Posted by: Jan | 04/28/2022 at 02:46 PM
I have thanked previous referees for their comments on "an earlier version of this article", so as to avoid Jan's problem.
Posted by: elisa freschi | 04/28/2022 at 06:34 PM
I've always assumed that thanking reviewers was just the reviewers at the journal it is published in. (After all, lots of people explicitly say '...and two anonymous reviewers of this journal.') But the DN thread indicated to me that my assumption is not universal. Regardless, I have thanked reviewers from a journal that rejected the paper, and named the journal in my acknowledgements. I did it because I was genuinely pleased with those comments, despite the reject, and I wanted the reviewers to know it if they were to stumble upon the paper.
Posted by: Tim | 04/28/2022 at 06:35 PM
I think there is a more natural way of thanking reviewers - and that is writing a letter and asking the journal editor to forward it - regardless of whether the paper was accepted or not.
Posted by: Jakub | 04/30/2022 at 04:47 AM
Jakub, that is a very nice thing to do of course, but it has little of the signaling power of public acknowledgments!
Posted by: Nicolas Delon | 04/30/2022 at 01:59 PM
“For their helpful feedback, I’d like to thank X, Y, Z, and anonymous referees from this and another journal.”
Posted by: T | 04/30/2022 at 06:29 PM
I do this and I think it's good to do this
Posted by: Jonathan Ichikawa | 05/05/2022 at 04:48 PM