Making changes and revisions to journal articles is really tricky. I’ve just spent the last week or so trying to revise an article for a special issue of a journal. I got some really helpful comments back a few weeks ago. The reviewers and editors comments were really positive and constructive. But I still find revising articles to be quite difficult. I’ve been trying to reflect on why this is.

In this case I had some relatively straightforward changes to make (at least I hope they were straightforward, the article hasn’t been accepted yet so I might have read it completely wrong). I still found it pretty challenging. On reflection one of the obstacles is the fear that the article will fall apart when the revisions start. The concern is that by changing some of the component parts the article will lose any coherence that it might have. As soon…