Imagine this scenario: it’s 4:30 pm on a Friday, you’ve been stalking your Outlook account for 7 straight hours, your deadline is coming up fast, and STILL the corresponding author of the article you’ve been working on for the whole week hasn’t gotten in touch via email or phone or passenger pigeon to answer your one SIMPLE QUERY that you probably already know the answer to but for the sake of best practices have to receive from them.

So with the prospect of being late for a much-needed end-of-the-week happy hour hanging over you, you consider your options. Do you ring for reinforcements? Do you call in the cavalry?

Sound familiar?

Communicating with authors is one of the most important and challenging parts of being a manuscript editor. There might be an impulse to jump to stereotypes about physicians when speculating why an author isn’t getting back to you (eg, Mr/Ms Ivory Tower can’t stoop to take time from being important and well-known to speak to Plebeian You) but the truth is that there are myriad reasons why authors can fall behind on their communication. While nobody wants to be the jerk who is insensitive to a busy schedule with patients, family emergencies, or a vigilant spam folder, you also have a job to do. If your work performance is at least partially based on meeting deadlines, you may want to consider one or a few of the following strategies to encourage a response.

1. Round up the gang. If a corresponding author isn’t responding to you in a timely way, you may want to reach out to some of the article’s other authors to enlist their help. You could do this in a simple, relatively nonconfrontational way by copying them on correspondence you share with the corresponding author, or you can give them a quick call. This may give you an uncomfortable feeling that you are tattling on the author (I’m not sure what the editorial version of “snitches get stitches” is–maybe “nerds get words”?), but remember that they also have a professional obligation to you. By reaching out you may be giving them an opportunity to re-delegate responsibilities in light of things going on behind the scenes.

2. Phone a friend. Manuscript editors are often only dealing with articles after they’ve been accepted, but it is likely that the authors have talked to multiple people affiliated with the journal along the article’s journey toward publication. If your journal has an editorial office that has shared correspondence with the author or somebody who worked with them during the peer review process, reaching out to them to ask if they can contact the author might yield a result. Some people are more comfortable communicating with people they’ve already dealt with, and a roundabout way of getting the information you need is a better alternative than radio silence.

3. Appeal to a higher power. In a perfect world titles wouldn’t matter, but let’s be real: they do. If the lack of author communication has gotten to the level where it is seriously gumming up the works, and if you can assess that it’s worthy of your supervisor’s time, escalating the situation upward might be your best option. It is truly astonishing how the words “Executive” and “Senior” can expedite a response!

4. Deploy the Shame Lady from Game of Thrones.

(Just kidding.)

So the next time you find yourself with a failure to communicate, don’t despair and whimper “Why won’t you talk to me?” to the computer screen—consider using one of these strategies to get the conversation rolling, the deadline met, and yourself to happy hour.—Amanda Ehrhardt