Revisions and FAQ

Referee Comments and Responses

This section describes this paper's path through review. We share the substantive parts of editors' reports (with permission), and explain how they shaped our changes to the paper. We tried to use AI to extract and share the substantive content of the referee reports, but after many attempts, we could not coax even the best language models to adequately summarize the main ideas.

What we submitted (Nov 14, 2025) Manuscript ↗

This submission was similar content-wise to what we had sent to REStud, but we spent a decent chunk of time restructuring and reformatted for PNAS. We thought we would have a good chance here since we selected Nobel laureates as both editor and associate editor. Nope.

Editor's comments (Nov 26, 2025)

The results of our assessment have led us to the decision to decline to consider it for publication at this time. [...] Our assessment is that your manuscript does not meet one or more of the principal aims of our journal and on this basis we expect that the likelihood that detailed review will lead to publication is low. This decision is necessarily subjective and does not reflect an evaluation of the technical quality of your work or of its appropriateness for a more specialized audience.

How we changed the paper

The usual result from sending a social science paper to a science journal. On to the next one.