For a scholar, having a manuscript rejected was hardly unusual.
Regardless of their reputation or past achievements, choosing the wrong journal or submitting work that fell short of its publication standards could get a manuscript sent back at some stage of the review process.
Having an already published paper retracted, however, was not something everyone got to experience.
Leaving aside low-quality journals that had already abandoned all standards and manuscripts still awaiting publication, every retraction of a paper already in print dealt a considerable blow to a journal's credibility. It amounted to publicly acknowledging that a published paper contained serious, irreparable errors.
As a result, journals were generally very cautious about retracting published papers unless there had been extremely serious academic fraud or some other incident damaging to a scholar's reputation.
The Haruko Obokata scandal, a case of academic fraud involving supposedly Nobel Prize-worthy research, had once rocked the biology community. Even after the entire academic community had concluded that her experimental results were Photoshopped, it was only when Japan's RIKEN could no longer withstand the pressure and obtained Obokata's written consent to withdraw her paper on STAP cells that Nature finally retracted the deeply controversial manuscript.
Although events in biology could not be directly compared with those in integrated circuit design, IEEE's stunt of suddenly retracting a paper after the conference presentation had already ended was decidedly unusual.
In short, after experiencing his first manuscript rejection, Lu Zhou now had a retraction under his belt as well. He felt that his academic career probably had no milestones left to tick off.
Still, this had been his first submission to a journal under IEEE. Journals geared toward electrical and electronic engineering were rather far removed from his own field. A leading electrical engineering journal had previously emailed him to solicit