Feel free to print it out and throw darts at it, or maybe make a roulette wheel kind of thing, or perhaps a ouija board. It seems to be in widespread use already, so there must be an easy way to use it.
1. The Power of Love: You love this paper! Well, you love the author. Maybe it's a romantic thing, maybe they once saved your ass by lending you their expertise/equipment/data, or maybe they bought you a drink once at a conference. Either way, they're awesome, so their paper must be fine.
2. Bee-in-your-Bonnet: You don't really care about this paper, but you do care, very strongly, about something else which is vaguely related. Many say that you're obsessed by it, though not to your face, because that would start you off talking about it. The problem with this paper is that it doesn't cover your pet idea. If the authors want it published, they'll need to change that, pronto. Major revisions are called for.
3. The Pedant: The paper is atrocious and doesn't deserve to be written on a scrap of toilet paper let alone submitted to this great Journal... in terms of spelling and formatting. Scientifically, you think it's probably pretty good, but it was hard to tell because of the amount of red ink you put all over it. English isn't the author's first language? That's their problem. Isn't that what "minor corrections" are for? No! That's what the bin is for.
4. Cite Me, Me, Me!: The problem with this paper is that it doesn't reference the right previous work... yours. Unless the authors change it to cite everything you've written in the past 10 years, they can get lost. If they do, the paper will be immediately accepted - to reject it would harm your citation count.
5. The Tortoise: You'll review this paper when you get back from holiday. And finished writing your own paper. After that conference. When you've finished your teaching for the year. Maybe. Until you submit your review, the authors are stuck in a horrible limbo, but luckily you're anonymous so they won't know who to send hate mail to.
6. The Cheerleader: This paper is awesome because it supports something that you yourself are about to publish. It's full of methodological holes? Never mind, that will only make your paper better by comparison. It's barely readable? Suggest edits to make it just about comprehensible so people can tell how well it supports you. Then accept a.s.a.p.
7. Wrong End of the Stick: You think you understand this paper, but actually you don't. So your review completely misses the point. When the authors point this out, you have two options: a) blame the paper for being confusing, and chuck it out or b) decide the whole thing is much too complicated to spend time over, and accept it.
8. The Perfect Reviewer: You are an intelligent, informed expert, new enough to the field that you have no axe to grind, and you take the time to read the paper fully, and return a constructive, perceptive review within a couple of weeks. Well done. Unfortunately, there are 1 or 2 other reviewers, and there's only a 1 in 8 chance they'll be like you...
9 comments:
Oh my gawwwd, we totally had a number 2 with the paper we just resubmitted, the other one luckily was a number 8. Sometimes I fake a number 4, by telling the authors to cite 5 consecutive papers by someone else ;)
(binned previous post for a typo)
a software solution of that kind should be incorporated into the electronic submission system.
What about: 'Good study, interesting findings well written, reject' - 'number 9. knight's move reviewing' maybe?
PJ: I think that's what happens when you spin the wheel twice: once to determine what you really think (and your recommendation to the editor), and again to determine how you'll write the review.
Seriously, though, many (all?) journals nowadays seem to have a two-tier review system, there's one review that goes out to the author and editor, and another that goes only to the editor. I'm not sure this is a good thing. It's good for the reviewers, but I'm not sure it's good for authors, and they're the ones that we should be trying to help.
Hey reviewers do their job. It would be fairly obvious if they're compromising their professional integrity to settle personal scores. This isn't cool.
a personal favorite is when a manuscript is rejected and asked not to be resubmitted based on the reviews of #7, the Wrong End of the Stick. clarification is so much harder when you are not allowed a rebuttal...
One wonders if this has any relation to the 'quality' of peer review or the papers submitted: (just replace 'biology' with any science and it'll come out the same. It's hardly likely only biologists would suffer from this)
"Conclusions
Our research shows that some college students correctly apply scientific principles when reasoning about the processes of the carbon cycle, but the majority of students use a mix of
principle-based and informal reasoning when asked to answer questions that require application or synthesis. We suggest that one reason students cannot trace matter and energy across processes and scales is that they lack a fundamental understanding of atoms and molecules (e.g., Benson et al. 1993). Another reason is that students often try to reason about large-scale or small-scale phenomena by inappropriately applying cultural models or their own embodied experiences, both of which are situated in the macroscopic world.
Applying fundamental principles such as conservation of matter and energy seems so straightforward to most biologists that they are hardly aware they do it. Their accounts of biological processes are constrained by the conservation laws in ways analogous to the ways their writing and speech are constrained by the rules of English grammar—they follow the rules more or less automatically. Yet even on posttests, the majority of students, even biology majors taking advanced courses, did not follow the rules automatically. So, why is applying these simple principles so hard? We think the answers to this question lie in the deep-seated nature of informal reasoning and in the way we currently teach biology."
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1828618/education_decline.pdf
It's hard not to be cynical, eh?
It reminds me of the text historical criteria...
"If I like it, it's early; if I specialise in it, it's very early; if I don't like it, but it's in my text, it's an interpolation."
I think your entire wheel just dropped on a recent paper I submitted to a a so-called high-tier journal :). I had four reviewers - two # 2s, a 4 and a fourth reviewer who had no problem with the paper, but didn't think it said anything significant. Not a single critique was consistent between the four. The editor could not make any other summary statement apart from the fact the reviewers didn't like it, and hence, we were rejected.
To top it all, one of the #2s received this same paper when I resubmitted to another journal, contacted me outside of the review process to insist their theory was correct and suggest that I should not even *run* the analyses I had. So much for the "scientific" process...
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