Six Rounds of Peer Review Pushed Two Scholars to Their Limits — Then They Turned the Ordeal Into Science

Every academic knows the dread of opening a review report, but few studies have documented what happens when the review process itself seems to spiral without end. A new duoethnographic study published in SN Social Sciences by Ngo Cong-Lem of Monash University and Dalat University and Tran Khanh-Quynh of Foreign Trade University in Vietnam offers a rare, longitudinal window into that experience. The two co-authors, positioned at very different points in their scholarly careers, spent roughly six months revising a single manuscript through six rounds of peer review before deliberately declining to submit a seventh. Their account, built from reflective journals, meeting notes, editorial correspondence, messaging-app exchanges, and tracked-changes documents, traces how the same editorial conditions came to mean profoundly different things to each of them — and how, out of that tension, a new piece of scholarship was born.

The study rests on a distinctive theoretical pairing drawn from the cultural-historical tradition. The first concept is perezhivanie, introduced by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which describes how social circumstances acquire psychological significance only as they are refracted through an individual’s emotions, history, and interpretation. The second is an object-oriented account of agency informed by cultural-historical activity theory, associated with Alexei Leontiev and Yrjö Engeström, in which action is understood as directed toward an object — the motivating problem space of an activity — and mediated by cultural, symbolic, and relational resources. Brought together, these frameworks allowed the researchers to move beyond simply cataloguing emotional responses and instead examine how changing interpretations of experience became linked to changing possibilities for action.

The narrative begins with optimism. The manuscript was submitted to a special issue whose theme appeared to align closely with the paper’s focus, and the experienced co-author, Participant 1, expressed confidence that it was the right venue. Across the first four rounds, the authors made substantial revisions, treating reviewer feedback as part of the normal labour of improving a paper. Yet even at this early stage, their experiences diverged in ways that would prove analytically decisive. For the novice author, Participant 2, each revision carried a double weight: the excitement of learning the conventions of scholarly publishing and the pressure of proving herself in what she described as a privileged community. Without a mental map of what a normal review process looked like, she followed reviewers’ suggestions almost unquestioningly, quietly asking herself whether this was what competent scholars did.

The experienced author’s uncertainty developed along a different track. His publishing history had taught him to expect that successive rounds would progressively resolve outstanding issues and move a manuscript toward a decision. When previously addressed concerns resurfaced and new expectations emerged, that expectation became increasingly difficult to sustain. He described the process as rewriting for a moving target, while clinging to the hope that one more round would bring resolution. By his own later reflection, six months of accommodation had eroded his sense of authorship: the paper no longer felt like theirs, and he wondered whether they were still authors or merely responders. Crucially, this articulation gave the novice author a new vocabulary for a problem she had felt but never named, marking the first shift from compliance toward questioning.

The decisive rupture came in the fifth round. Responsibility for the manuscript shifted from the original guest editor to an Associate Editor-in-Chief, and the new reports appeared to come from a different set of reviewers, some of whom revisited issues the authors believed had been resolved. Participant 1, armed with a comparative frame built from many prior review processes, immediately located the problem in the editorial handling: some comments, he said, were not even about the paper they had written. Participant 2, lacking that frame, initially turned the uncertainty inward. Paradoxically, the presence of an experienced co-author intensified her self-doubt — if difficulties persisted despite his expertise, perhaps the deficiency lay with her. She later characterised the experience not as a single dramatic blow but as a slow erosion, in which the manuscript came to feel less like a contribution and more like a test she could not quite pass.

This contrast between the two authors is where the study’s theoretical contribution becomes vivid. The same editorial conditions acquired different psychological meanings because they were lived through different histories and expectations. Experience, the analysis shows, cuts both ways: it supplied the veteran with resources for critically evaluating the process, but it also generated expectations whose frustration produced a distinct form of disappointment. For the novice, the absence of comparative knowledge made ambiguity itself consequential, since she could not tell whether the difficulties stemmed from the manuscript, the journal, or her own capacity. Neither interpretation was fixed. Through dialogue — recorded in meeting notes and messaging threads — the experienced author’s knowledge became a mediating resource through which the novice could relocate the problem from personal inadequacy to the conditions of the review process itself.

After the sixth revision, the editors requested yet another round, this time within a single week. The authors paused for roughly two weeks, and the experienced author articulated a position that the study treats as a turning point: they would revise, but they needed to draw a line, and if the paper was rejected, so be it. When the seventh revision was not resubmitted, the manuscript was rejected for non-resubmission. The authors are careful to frame this outcome not as failure or exhaustion but as intentional boundary-setting — a deliberate choice that the process was no longer worth the time and effort it demanded. In their account, refusing to continue was itself a form of agency, exercised within an evaluative relationship marked by unequal decision-making authority.

The study’s most original conceptual move follows from what happened next. Rather than ending their scholarly engagement, the authors redirected the accumulated tensions, materials, and relationships of the failed publication attempt into a new object of inquiry: the peer-review experience itself, examined through the present duoethnography. They name this process generative agency — the mediated actions through which actors reorganise the experiences and resources generated within one activity around a newly constituted object, giving rise to an associated but analytically distinct activity. The concept differs from object expansion, which reconceptualises the goal of an existing activity, and from transformative agency, which seeks to change an activity’s institutional conditions. Generative agency instead describes a branching developmental trajectory that becomes visible only when analysis extends beyond the boundaries of a single activity system.

The authors are explicit about the limits of this framing. Generativity should not be romanticised: prolonged tension may just as easily lead to withdrawal, disengagement, or burnout, and a discontinued activity does not automatically seed a new one. The duoethnographic method, however, proved unusually well suited to tracing how meaning was reorganised, because it treated the novice–experienced difference as an analytical resource rather than a complication. The authors also stress the ethical labour involved when researchers are simultaneously participants, including ongoing mutual consent and negotiated disclosure, and they note that institutional ethics requirements should still be confirmed before such research begins.

The practical implications reach from doctoral education to editorial policy. The authors argue that novice scholars need more than technical instruction in writing response letters; they need structured access to comparative knowledge about how review processes vary across journals, guidance on distinguishing essential from negotiable requests, and collaborative spaces — writing groups, mentoring relationships — where reviewer comments can be interpreted collectively rather than through individual trial and error. Responsibility for reducing ambiguity, they insist, should not rest primarily with authors. Drawing on earlier scholarship on editorial integrity, they call on journals to explain why reviewers are replaced, clarify whether newly raised concerns are essential to the decision, and provide explicit synthesis when comments conflict or repeat earlier demands. Whether such transparency measures can make prolonged review more coherent and developmentally supportive — without dulling its critical function — remains an open empirical question, one the authors hope future longitudinal and multiperspectival studies, including negative cases, will help answer.

Subject of Research: Emotion, agency, and researcher development in prolonged academic peer review, examined through duoethnography and cultural-historical theory

Article Title: “How many rounds is enough?” A duoethnographic study of emotion, repositioning, and agency in academic peer review

Article References: Cong-Lem, N., & Khanh-Quynh, T. (2026). “How many rounds is enough?” A duoethnographic study of emotion, repositioning, and agency in academic peer review. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01674-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01674-4

Keywords: peer review, academic publishing, duoethnography, perezhivanie, cultural-historical activity theory, agency, emotion, researcher development, editorial practice, early-career researchers, generative agency, scholarly identity