I've not received a decision about my probability paper from the journal to which I submitted it four months ago, and the journal's website continues to report the paper's status as Waiting.

It might seem that none of the various reasons given by previous journals for rejection could be offered with plausibility after four months, as the supposèd short-comings pronounced by earlier editors and reviewers would quickly be evident. However, my experience is that some journals feel entitled simply to report — Ooops! — that work got lost or delayed in process, but could quickly be seen to be grossly deficient either before it was mislaid or after it was unstuck.

Meanwhile, I think that any reasonable reviewer will make a cursory examination of a paper before accepting it, that any reviewer competent to assess my probability paper would quickly recognize that its potential significance were considerable, and that he or she would therefore be reluctant to delay for weeks before making a more careful reading. Perhaps a long time were required to find a reviewer, or perhaps the paper is once again in the hands of some credentialed fool not competent to review it.

I hesitate to query the handling editor, for fear that, as in the case of the previous journal, the paper would be given-over to a reviewer who promises a quick review and then provides remarks that are careless and wrong. On the other hand, I also know from experience (with my paper on indecision) that some journals will allow a paper to idle indefinitely unless its author rebels.

I've not yet received a decision on my probability paper from the journal to which I had most recently submitted it, and the journal's website continues to report the paper's status as Waiting, although 20 May was a soft dead-line (and 20 May has passed in Europe).

It was only a soft dead-line because the journal simply declared that they attempt to report a decision within three months. Actually, three months is a target widely adopted by academic journals, though the target is often missed.

In any case, at this point it would not be considered inappropriate for me to query the handling editor about the paper, though I'm not sure what good would currently come of such a query. I'm inclined to believe that some journals will hand a paper to a referee for a quick-and-dirty review if pushed, and I'd rather just withdraw the submission than receive another derelict review.

I continue to regard a rejection as the most likely outcome and a Monday as the mostly day for a decision. I've not yet decided where next to submit my paper should the present journal reject it.

A psychologist once told me that people do not begin to dream until they've fallen into a relatively deep sleep. I know her assertion to be false based upon my own experience and upon the reports of others. Some of us begin dreaming right after or perhaps right before falling asleep. Being either barely on one side of consciousness or perhaps in an intermediate state in which dreaming occurs is not quite the same as what is normally called lucid dreaming, but I'm able to notice some peculiar psychological phenomena as such.

Amongst these are spurious memories. In a dreaming state, I seem to remember events that did not occur in the waking world, though I don't experience those events within the dream. Because the events are not dreamt, but instead there is an apparent memory of these events, it can be harder upon becoming wakeful to discern that the apparent memory were false. But such spurious memories do disintegrate much like memories of dreamt events. In fact, I notice apparent memories often disintegrating within dreams, which disintegration is sufficiently troubling to make me more wakeful.

One disintegration, experienced a few mornings ago, was especially disturbing. I dreamt that I had an old Japanese bank note, and I had (spurious) memories of how I'd acquired the note. But I dreamt that some woman stole the note from me; and, as I dreamt of that theft, my apparent memories of how I'd come to have the note disintegrated, as if themselves stolen.

Another Monday has effectively passed without my receiving a rejection from the latest journal to which I offered my paper on probability.

My paper was submitted to that journal on 20 February, and on 2 March I was informed that it were assigned to a handling editor and that I'd be notified when a report were returned by a reviewer. I don't know whether a reviewer has accepted the assignment; but, while sometimes it takes months to find a reviewer, usually that happens more quickly. The journal says that it makes an effort to make a decision within three months; but, at most journals, reviewers are asked to return a report in something like four weeks or a month. So, while the three-month mark is six weeks away, it is increasingly plausible that a decision will be made soon.

Those who review academic articles and edit academic journals do so as a side activity, and are most likely to give time to this activity on the weekends. Additionally, weekends are psychologically natural for self-imposed deadlines. Monday becomes the most probable day for an editor to inform an author of a decision. Because the journal and the handling editor are in Europe, Monday effectively ends in what is for me the late after-noon.

And the most likely decision is a rejection. I don't think that I quite said this when previously writing about submitting my article to a journal. Instead, I wrote about the fate of most articles being rejection. But, after observing the responses of reviewers at those previous journals, I've reached a judgment about probability. It's probable that my article will again be rejected.

Thus, on each Monday, I look for a rejection.

On 20 February, I submitted my paper on probability to yet another academic journal. To my surprise, the journal in question gave me a choice as to whether my review would be doubly blind — with my identity withheld from the reviewers; I chose that option.

Although in my initial reading of the longer of the two reviews that I most recently received I found no worthwhile criticism, I thought that I should pore over that review carefully, to ensure that I didn't overlook anything in it that would cause me to improve my paper. However, though the review was not written with abusive intent, it is none-the-less abusive, and I was averse to reading it. To impel myself to read it carefully, I decided to write a response to each of the criticisms within it, as I would then have to take care to find and to consider each criticism. I completed a draft of the response without finding any good reason to revise my paper. Having gone that far with the draft, I proofread it on 21 February, and posted a version on-line. It is written more in the manner of a 'blog entry than of something intended to go into a journal or book; and I don't know that any of you would want to bother with reading it in any case. But it's available.

Between the time that I previously submitted the paper and the time that received the most recent decision, I more efficiently organized the citations in one paragraph and I compressed one appendix by removing formula numbers and by suppressing logical quantifiers so that its eleven formulæ could be placed into a one-page grid.

In the early morning of 2 March, I received e.mail indicating that my probability paper had been assigned to a handling editor (who was named), and that I would be contacted after a reviewer had returned a report. It seems that the threat of a desk rejection has passed. I made a very cursory check on the handling editor; she seems quite qualified.

On 15 January, in response to a friend, I wrote

But I'm not particularly hopeful. The paper presents a confluence of challenges to philosophers, and I've come to doubt that most of them even with supposedly relevant expertise will recognize the hurdles and attempt to clear them until Authority has told them that they ought to do so.

The reported status of my probability paper remained Reviews Completed into 21 January, but became Reject some time in the morning. (I did not observe an intermediate status of Editor Has a Decision.) The editors wrote

Thanks for submitting your manuscript to [journal] and for your patience during the process. One reviewer hasn't submitted their report for very long after accepting the task, despite the numerous reminder sent. We decided to seek for a third reviewer, who kindly agree to read the paper with a very short delay. Unfortunately, both reports point to a number of problems in the manuscript, we therefore decided not to offer publication at this stage.
Thanks again for your patience in waiting for the editorial decision.

(Note that the last reviewer was said to have agreed to read the paper with a very short delay.) The reporting reviewers were identified with Reviwer #2 and Reviewer #3, which suggests that the reviewer who never returned a report was the earliest to accept.

Reviewer #2 wrote

I think there are some good ideas in the paper, but it needs to be significantly more polished and tightly focused to be publishable. Please see attached report for more comments.

Unfortunately, the attached report was not attached to the e.mail that I received, nor made available to me by way of Editorial Manager; so I am completely unable to consider whatever it may assert. I have written both to the Journals Editorial Office and to the handling editor noting that the report has not been furnished to me.

Reviewer #3 wrote

This is not an easy paper to judge; in a different type of journal I could come to a different judgment. However, I think that the paper is, in spite of its merits, not suited for the [journal]. I have four main concerns:

1. The argument relies on research in logic and artificial intelligence. The average [journal] reader cannot be expected to be familiar with that formalism (in fact, I am not although I work on probability myself). It would be more appropriate for Reviw of Symbolic Logic, Artificial Intelligence or a similar journal.
2. It is not fully clear whether the paper gives an original account of whether it is mainly a summary/presentation of results in the qualitative probability research program. So it is hard to assess the originality of the research.
3. The author tries to embed the formal part of the paper into considerations about the history of probability and its use in science (e.g., confidence intervals in statistics), but these links remain tenuous and sometimes outright unconvincing. With respect to the coherence of the conceptual, philosophical and the formal part, the paper could be improved substantially.
4. The writing could be clearer.

With respect to these concerns, I would have four responses:

1. The formal logic as such of my paper is strictly material that can be found in undergraduate introductory courses, and I very deliberately made no reference to artificial intelligence as such, nor employed research peculiar to what is generally recognized as artificial intelligence.[1] I did cite one article from a journal that is primarily consumed by such researchers, but that article was written to be accessible by a wider audience, and I cited the article only to support a claim that use of intervals (as opposed to bare preörderings) has not been completely satisfactory.
   
   The formalisms that wouldn't be found in an undergraduate course in formal logic but are found in my paper are very simple and clearly defined. There are single symbols for each of the probability relations; for example, ▷ for is more probable than. And there is (X|c) for X, given c; so that (X|c)▷(Y|d) would be read as X given c is more probable than Y given d. That's it. Now, in everyday probability theory p(X|c) already means the [measure of] probability of X given c, so my (X|c) should be easily understood. Keynes and Koopman instead wrote X/c (with a slash instead of a vertical bar, and without parentheses), which looks like arithmetic division.
   
   If the reviewer works on probability him- or herself, and is not already used to formalism on this order, then he or she is unfortunately committed in practice to sufficient assumptions to ensure measurability of probabilities.
2. The introduction to my paper clearly identifies the prior research and notes what that research failed to do. The body of the paper compares and contrasts my axiomata with those of the previous researcher who got furthest, and cites other work when it approximates my other axiomata.
3. The paper is already too long to be accepted in various journals, but the reviewer wants me to labor issues further. And it would be good if he or she would provide an example of something that he or she found outright unconvincing.
4. Similarly, I would want an example of a passage that the reviewer thought should be made more clear. I expect that what the reviewer truly felt was that the writing were spartan, which is often is, in order to keep its length in check.

I've now seen the report from Reviewer #2. It would probably take a paper of some length to explain everything wrong with it. I'll just furnish a couple of examples.

I use various terms from the English language in their ordinary, everyday senses, but the reviewer presumes that I must be using them in special senses, and then objects that I've not provided definitions. For example, I wrote

A pure frequentism or a pure combinatoric interpretation of probability would force [relation in which there is no relative order of probability] to be empty, as also (trivially) would betting quotients. But logicism and subjectivism in general do not require it to be empty. (An impure frequentism would be one in which [weak supraprobability] and [weak infraprobability] were always about beliefs about frequency; similarly for an impure combinatoric interpretation.)

Note that I even provided a parenthetical note that shows how an impure frequentism would be distinguished from a pure frequentism, but the reviewer insists that I'd introduced undefined jargon.

In my paper, I noted that twelve of what are the thirteen axiomata of my system are theoremata of the Kolmogorov axiomata, and the the remaining axiom conforms to the Kolmogorov axiomata, so that they must be at least as consistent as the Kolmogorov axiomata.[2]

The reader can trivially verify that, while what I offer as axiomata are not sufficient to imply the Kolmogorov axiomata, his axiomata imply (A1) through (A5) and (A7) through (A13), and that (A6) conforms to the Kolmogorov axiomata. Thus, the axiomata are at least as consistent as are those popular systems, and are at least as consistent as are any systems whose axiomata imply those principles which are Kolmogorov’s axiomata.

The reviewer misrepresents me as using conform in some special, undefined way, and as claiming that the thirteen axiomata are consistent for no better reason than because they exhibit such unexplained conformance.

As I will explain in a later 'blog entry, I wrote a response to each of the criticisms found in the longer review. I don't know that this response will be of current use to anyone else, but I have made it available on-line.

[1] There is a very important sense in which logic itself is artificial intelligence, and I'd someday like to labor that point. But the reviewer was referring to intelligence in devices external to the human mind.

[2] Because the Kolmogorov axiomata use arithmetic, they must be incomplete or inconsistent; but I do not raise that issue in my paper.

On 15 October, I posted an entry on the status of my paper that presented a table showing the reported status of my probability paper, along with the date-stamp associated with that status. I declared

I'm not going to post a separate entry for each change, but will just up-date the table above until the status becomes Reviews Completed.

Those who checked that entry know that, on the next day, the status of the paper changed from Reviewers Assigned to Under review, but that it then languished for more than twleve weeks. In the meantime, I added notes to the entry about the passage of time, about my communication with the editorial office and then with the handling editor, and about a new reviewer having been selected and accepted the assignment on 10 January.

On 14 January, the reported status of the paper became Reviews Completed.

Typically, most of the time between when a reviewer accepts an assignment and when he or she completes it is spent on concerns without meaningful relationship to the review (except in-so-far as they displace it). If reviewers had to turn immediately to the task of reviewing a paper, then far fewer would accept the responsibility. Setting aside all but truly everyday activities, it is quite possible to review a paper in a matter of a very few days, and certainly in less than five.

None-the-less, a review as speedy as must have been the last review has me especially concerned that the job may suffer from some of the deficiencies associated with a rushed review, or that the reviewer may otherwise not have recognized with significance of what were said in my paper.

In a private communication, a friend writes:

I have, several times, been asked by an editor to read a paper over, without being a formal reviewer, and send her my thoughts. Sometimes, I am then made a formal reviewer (whether I have sent my thoughts or not) when one of the other reviews withdraws or is unable or unwilling to complete a review.

I had not considered a possibility of this sort.

On 15 October, the reported status of my probability paper reverted from Under review to Reviewers Assigned. That change means that at least one reviewer who had accepted the assignment has since withdrawn. Since the reported status of my paper has ceased to be monotonic, I'm not going to post a separate entry for each change, but will just up-date the table above until the status becomes Reviews Completed.

The reported status and its date-stamp have remained unchanged since 16 October. Since the editor moved relatively rapidly between receipt of the paper and assigning it to reviewers, I'm going to infer that the editor is likely diligent and that the reported status would have been changed had all reviews been returned, or had a reviewer withdrawn since 16 October.

I've read of one journal that requests that reviews be returned within two weeks, but more typically journals ask that they be returned within three weeks, within four weeks, or within a month. I know that many reviewers fail to meet these requests.

I've seen very little data on how long the typical review takes; that data was not partitioned according to outcomes. Useful data partitioned according to whether the review were competent is surely not available.

The reported status and its date-stamp remain unchanged after the passage of two months.

24 December represented the third mensiversary of the most recent submission of my paper. By itself, three months is not a bad figure; in some cases, it might be a month before an editor had read a paper, and it might take another two months to find reviewers.

But 25 December represented the ten-week mark for the paper's reported status of Under review; that is quite a long time. I sent e.mail to the Journals Editorial Office:

For ten weeks, the reported status of my paper has been Under review. Within what interval does your journal ask reviewers to complete their reviews?

My question wasn't rhetorical. (I generally try to avoid rhetorical questions.) It is possible that reviewers are typically given a rather long time by this particular journal; it is also possible that a decision was made to suggest an atypical length of time to one or both reviewers.

The first reply from the Journals Editorial Office, in the morning of 27 December, perfectly failed to answer my question. So I swiftly reïterated my query. This morning, I received what I believe to be the best response that the Office might give:

Please be advised that we are sending reminders to reviewer after 3, 8 and 13 days upon the acceptance of the invitation. More than, we escalate it to the Editor for further action.

I'm surprised that reminders should be sent at three days and at eight, and I'm surprised that escalation should occur at less than three weeks.

But, in any case, as more than ten weeks have past, by the standards of the JEO, at least one of the reviews is wildly overdue. I do not know what the editor imagines.

In the late after-noon of 8 January, I sent e.mail to the handling editor, which message read

My paper has now begun its thirteenth week since the status was last changed to Under review. This span seems quite excessive.

The handling editor responded on 10 January:

One reviewer is very late, despite the numerous reminders sent. We are considering now what to do to speed up the process.
Thanks for your patience,
[editor name]

Sometime during 11 January, the reported status of my paper became Under review with a date-stamp of 10 January. I did not observe an interval when the reported status was Reviewers assigned between when last the date-stamp was 16 October and when the date-stamp became 10 January.

With a date-stamp of 12 October, the reported status of my probability paper has become Under review, indicating that a set of reviewers have accepted the assignment. (Editorial Manager seems to be inconsistent about capitalization.) There were no changes in the date stamp when the status was Reviewers Assigned, so it seems that the first set of reviewers accepted the assignment.

It is possible for reviewers to withdraw, in which case the reported status would revert to Reviewers Assigned. Otherwise, one expects that within about a month the reviewers will complete their task, and the status will become Reviews Completed, followed by Editor Has a Decision.

On previous occasions, rather than saying that my own paper would probability be rejected by reviewers, I've made the statistical claim that most reviews of academic papers result in rejection. But, at this stage, I am more willing to say that my paper will probably be rejected by these reviewers. Still, I hope for a better outcome.

With a date-stamp of 5 October, the reported status of my probability paper has become Reviewers Assigned, which indicates that some person or persons have been asked by the editor to review the paper. If he, she, or they decline, then I will later see a change in the time-stamp but the same reported status. If he, she, or they accept, then the status will become Under Review.

The change in status from Editor Assigned was relatively swift; an editor might more typically take a month before deciding whether to send a paper to reviewers or instead to issue a desk rejection, which rejection is the fate of the majority of papers sent to academic journals (setting aside the various vanity journals).

I will hope that the task of reviewing is quickly accepted by competent reviewers, and certainly that it is not again undertaken by reviewers who will look only inside the box of conventional theory in attempting to understand a paper that primary considers matters outside of that box.