Substantiating the Unsubstantiated

I got a round of final stage (I think--that's what he/she said) recommedations back on a manuscript from an editor before the revised version is resubmitted for another external review. (He/she is an EXTREMELY helpful editor, BTW.) The final revisions concerned substantiating a couple unsubstantiated claims in the intro paragraphs of the manuscript. As I began looking for sources to offer as textual evidence, I found myself reverting back to a couple of practices that us writing teachers often tell our students NOT to do:

1. Sprinkle "salt and pepper" quotes throughout the draft to sound more academic: Yeah, I found myself trying to find that one quote to insert with the claim and be done with it!
2. Only find quotes that seem to justify your stance without looking at the overall context of the argument/text. Claims needed to be supported and I needed to find the evidence. Why not use it?

In case your asking, of course I went back through the works to look at the context before finalizing the revisions. I also made some stylistic changes so that the manuscript did not read like a "cover your a** with a citation" document. Nonetheless, I still think that citations practices in relationship to academic "discoursey" language are critical conversations to have not only with undergraduate students, but also graduate students, and need I say, faculty members too? When does a claim become a new concept for the field and not something that has to be substantiated? Seriously. The answer is not as simple as saying, "when no one has written about X." How do you know when no one is written about X? And if you do work with African American women's intellectual traditions in the academy (not outside the academy) you'll probably find yourself substantiating EVERYTHING!

Revise/Resubmit

I got some fantastic comments from reviewers who reviewed one of the manuscripts I have out for review right now at a fairly well-known journal in our field. The comments were clear, dead-on, and I think will be valuable as I revise. Since this is my first revise/resubmit article, I had to ask for consultation on etiquette with journals when resubmitting a manuscript. Thanks to Radical Transparency, I got some really good advice (also huge shout-outs to her for successfully defending her dissertation). Both Paul Matsuda's Blog and the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on publishing also have some good advice for authors who resubmit manuscripts, also very helpful.

This process puts me back in my earlier student days (as both an undergrad and graduate student), and because of this, I'm a little concerned. If I consider our pedagogical scholarship, many writing teachers make recommended suggestions for students' revision, though students need not necessarily make all of the changes recommended by instructors. But as an author, I still feel that there is this unspoken rule (not quite sure where it comes from) that I must make all of the changes recommended by reviewers. Although most of their recommendations I do believe to need changing, what will happen if I don't follow all of their suggestions? For example, with some of the changes I made, other suggestions become obsolete or less relevant because the focus of the article has shifted based on another suggestion given by reviewers. What happens then? I know that I should probably think that reviewers should understand this, but I'm still concerned about expectations that authors should take all reviewers' suggestions.

I guess this is similar to the idea that many students have when we as instructors offer recommended revisions. If they consider them all and "fix the mistakes", in their mind, they're supposed to get an A, right? If I do everything the reviewers recommend, they'll be more accepting of the article, right? I of course know that things don't work that simply here, and I'm not trying to provide overly simplistic or unsubstantiated claims; however, I'm still suspicious that there might be one reviewer out there who has the expectation that writers address all of their recommendations in the revised manuscript. I have no evidence or justification; it's just my paranoia. Thoughts?