Disclaimer: This is not supposed to be a bashing of a specific reviewing system or any specific person but a frustration of the reviewing system in general. I might yet be in the 4th stage of grief.
Rejections are almost always bad (except probably some) and I guess all researchers have faced them at some point - be it a grant application or a paper. So, rejections are not really new to us (See @YourPaperSucks and many others). But out of all those harsh comments, there are some that prick the most. Sometimes for a good reason - a simpler viewpoint of the data that fits better with the data but not with your idea or a control experiment that you should have performed or a bad statistical error. But some others hurt not because of the soundness of the paper but because of prejudices and opposite viewpoints. This bad rejection is about the latter. As a context, the review that I refer to, was not from a journal but from a very interesting conference. Of course, I would be biased in evaluating the interest level and the usefulness of my personal work and it would be understandable if the conference editors decide that the work was not interesting enough for them. However, I take exception to two specific points:
While surely, I am not the first one that has commented on these topics and twitter especially is full of lengthy discussions on these topics, my point is that it's high time that we start taking these concerns seriously. The tone of the review. No matter how badly a paper might be written or a study performed, no one should undermine others work as "The authors perform a relatively simple study " or "Useful experimental fact, but not totally unexpected that this can be made work,". Each study designed not only requires a huge amount of time to execute but also weeks (and often months) of planning. So, in my opinion, to say that someone performed a simple study is to disregard all the hard work authors put in the study. Again, we are all aware of the Hindsight bias or knew-it-all-along effect. So to say that a work is not totally unexpected, in my opinion, is to lower the efforts of the authors (not to mention the huge importance of replicating multiple effects). Prejudices against some theories. While I agree that we all have our pet theories and it's probably perfectly fine to be biased to them (as long as you are open to alternate views given data), it is not proper to be disrespectful to views of the others. I believe, propositions of the order "skip grand conclusions." are misplaced in a scientific review. Overall, while my blog might have stemmed from the anguish and frustration of the review, I am positive that the more everyone is aware of such issues, the better it should get. A similar (more positive) position has been voiced by a recent nature news article that talks about the prejudices in research and does a nice job at summarizing the issues.
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About meI am a neuroscientist working on social cognition. (I was told not to be fancy.) Archives
June 2016
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