Tag Archives: peer review

Systematically reject requests to review: a shameful behaviour?

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I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions – and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.
– Bill Vaughan

Every time you publish in a peer-reviewed journal, you mobilize anywhere from 3 to 5 persons who will work absolutely for free on your manuscript. Minimally, you will have two reviewers and an associate editor, all who will take the time to read and critics your work. On the top of that, the editor will also spend times on it. If needed, a third reviewer will also be requested. 

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The reviewers are always right…even when they are wrong!-

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Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.
– Al Gore

One important aspect of scientific research is dissemination of the results through peer-reviewed publications. In a previous post, I discussed the choice of venue and the relative (un)importance of the journal impact factor. In this post, I address what happen in-between that first submission and the actual publication.

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The tyranny of the top science journals?

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Are journals like Science, Nature and the like giving too much importance to themselves to the point of distorting the scientific process? A Nobel prize winner seems to think so (from The Guardian)

Exit impact factor and h-index, welcome real-time reputation metrics?

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An interesting reads at TechCrunch on new forms of dissemination and measurements of scientific impact: Reputation Metrics Startups Aim To Disrupt The Scientific Journal Industry.

In a similar vein, you might want to read the excellent editorial by John R. Alder from Stanford entitled “A New Age of Peer Reviewed Scientific Journals” published in the open access journal Surgical Neurology International. The manuscript is available on Cureus blog.

 

Most of the crackpot papers which are submitted to The Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half-understood; to everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.