Sunday, February 01, 2009

"Peer review is the worse system, apart from all the others" 
Tales of horror in the Academy

LemmusLemmus reports on a couple of excellent "editors are bastards and wouldn't know a qualified reviewer from a half-wit" anecdotes:


Everyone has one or two of these: share yours in the comments.

3 comments:

Political Scientist said...

And to kick off: a reviewer who claimed not to know what a bi-exponential looked like on a log scale, whined that we didn't cite an "important" paper from the early 90's*, and rounded it off by announcing the theory section was "wrong" because, incredibly, the silly bugger had forgotten his 3rd year condensed matter physics.

Wot, me, bitter much?

Happy ending tho: a strongly worded letter to the editor, the paper was sent to a second reviewer how described it as "an important contribution" which was "very well written"**
[Synonyms have been used to protect the guilty]

*Indeed I did not, tho' I would have done if it weren't shit. I quoted earlier and later papers that weren't shit.
** Which, while was very flattering, was far too kind, but at least they published the bloody thing.

pj said...

I think my favourite review simply said that they preferred the radioactive tracer 35S to radioiodine and so could you do the (year long) study using that instead?

Political Scientist said...

PJ is clearly in the lead at the moment - can anyone top that?