This is why the US govt is broke...

I have to travel for a review panel and I've received my plane ticket from the US's travel agent. The cost of the ticket is ~$1200, whereas the same ticket through Orbitz is ~$400.

Having to go through expensive, pre-determined, preferred vendors is just one of the many examples as to why the US govt is broke.

Declining to Review

Over the past few days, I've had a few requests to review show up in my inbox. I accept that reviewing manuscripts is a part of my academic service and it's something you're supposed to do for the good of the global community. There is also some personal benefit because reviewing other work helps you critique your own and makes you a better writer. Unless I am travelling, I have always accepted the reviewing assignments I'm given.

Except today...

This was a fortunate case (for me) where you can see the manuscript in its entirety prior to accepting/declining to review. Some journals only let you see the abstract and then it's more difficult to decide because the abstract may sound like it's in your area but the manuscript is actually not in your area. (On a side note, I have had this happen several times and it's a bitch to do a good review.) Being able to see the manuscript in its entirety was crucial. From reading the abstract, I thought "Hmm, well this is definitely my area. Guess I have another one to add to my pile." Once that PDF was on screen, it was an entirely different story.

After skimming and picture hunting, the manuscript failed to pass any of the normal publication requirements like does this really need to be published, is the topic/data highly relevant, and isn't this just combined piecemeal from multiple places? So I took the easy way out and just said "Nope, not reviewing". I feel bad about it because I'm shirking my duties as an academic but it would have (at best) been annoying and time consuming to review.

So, for any of you out there that have done a lot of manuscript reviewing, how often does this come up for you? What do you end up doing? Is it right or wrong to just decline to review because at first glance you think there's no shot at getting it published?

Two extremes from the same paper

I recently received a follow up email from a journal for which I regularly perform reviews asking me to review and comment on a revised manuscript from a previous review. This is not something unusual in my experience and since I reviewed the article once, going over a revised manuscript on the same topic is par for the course.

The first thing I did is review my comments to the authors and then I looked at the comments from the second reviewer. What I saw actually shocked me. I had extensive comments, particularly about basing their entire support for their method on a non-peer reviewed white paper, and it was clear (to me) several things needed correction prior to acceptance. Scientifically, the article was actually very good. But the presentation, references, and supporting discussion needed work. The second reviewer just had a stirring recommendation to accept because this was the greatest engineered piece of work since the machine that slices bread. The second reviewer had no other comments.

In my experience, I have never seen an article 100% perfect for publication and neither have the other reviewers (from the review reports I've seen). Also, I've co-authored enough articles to know there are always things you can make better, either by better graphs and figures or by improving the discussion. And, in fact, when I submit an article, I freely expect the "once these changes are made, I expect this article will be suitable for publication" comment. There are a few reasons for this.

1. No one does anything perfect the first time, at least not me (or I? my grammatical skills are terrible!). I have a colleague who has, along with his 5 co-authors and 2 reviewers, missed a misspelling in the article title and it was only caught during typesetting.
2. Fresh eyes always bring new things to the fore.
3. You're going to have a stupid mistake. Everyone does.
4. Reviewers, and by reviewers I mean Everyone, likes to nit-pick at other peoples' work.

That brings me to a couple of questions I have on the subject. When you submit an article for publication, do you expect minor revisions or do you expect it to be 100% accepted? When you review an article, do you ever accept without any changes? What should be the normal amount for both?

Submit it anyway

I’m tired of hearing about poor graduate students whose advisors don’t take the time look over their papers or don’t give timely comments on their work. If it’s about to be submitted for a journal, then it should be important for the advisor and they have an obligation to look at it and give extensive comments in a timely fashion. If your advisor is failing to do that, then they’re doing a bad job of advising in my opinion.

Contrary to anything you might hear otherwise, all authors on a paper are treated equally even though some think they only have "management/guidance" roles. All authors should know the research and should be willing to help. More importantly, all authors get the same amount of credit no matter how much work they individual contributed. So if you are working on a paper and feel like someone's not contributing their part, then say so. If you think you've got a good start, just say so. Publishing helps all authors equally so we, as co-authors, should be willing to write some of the work.

Let’s take a paper with 5 authors on it. The breakdown is usually as follows:

• Author 1: Main author, did most of the writing and research. Can explain the technical aspects, chug through math, models, data, etc, but has limited scope for the overall picture.
• Author 2: Generally the main author’s partner in the lab, immediate mentor, or fellow PhD student who helped gather/analyze data. Helped with some of the writing.
• Authors 3 & 4: These two Authors contributed some technical aspects and offered advice. If you’re ever looking for these two Authors, my money is on them not being in the lab.
• Author 5: Often the main advisor, grant getting, knows the overall plan for the project but (all too often) doesn’t know the technical details.

Officially though, everyone is equally counted as a co-author on the paper, and that’s the aspect that I disagree with. If Authors 3 and 4 only gave a little bit of advice, then thank them in the acknowledgements. If Authors 1 and 2 have kicked the paper around for a while, Author 5 should have the decency to comment within a few days. Otherwise remove their name! I think it’s fair for you (as the main author) to send the work and say I need comments within X number of days or a very good reason why you can’t do that, otherwise I’ll just remove your name and submit it anyway.

You may be a graduate student but this is why we have peer review. There’s no reason why you need a professor’s name on the paper to get it published. In certain instances it helps. But if your work is good enough, then go for it. If it passes peer review, then it’s good enough and then maybe your advisor will take notice that you’re not messing around and you’re not just a lab minion.

Open or Blind

I can imagine that a lot of reviewers (and I’m guilty of it too) relish a poorly written article only so that they can absolutely crush it. I’ve done enough reviews to know they’re annoying and tedious, yet necessary. However, when the work clearly doesn’t warrant publishing, or the authors have gross lapse in literature review, or it’s just poorly written/described/presented, reviewing for the sake of “helping the community” starts to lose its footing as a reason.

With one-sided blind reviews, the author does not know the reviewers but the reviewers know the authors. Eventually, I think most publishers will switch from this current system to either Open-Open, or Double-Blind. The reasons for a Double-Blind review are fairly strong. Helps remove gender bias, location bias, and research bias. The only major problem with this review system is the reviewer (if they’re any good…) should know who else in the world is working on similar research. Plus, with conferences, references, and a good literature study, the reviewer can easily figure out well established groups. Thus, in the end, I think the Double-Blind review process will in effect always be a quasi- one-sided blind.

An Open-Open review, on the other hand, lays everything out on the table. Authors know exactly who is critiquing them and (hopefully) the reviewers will give strong reviews (either for or against), even when their name is attached to it. The main problem with this type of review system is the softening of the review. Reviewers might be less inclined to reject a paper or even give strong criticism. Also, retaliation for a particular review is a problem.

In most of my reviews (which are typically one-sided blind), I have generally added the statement:

“I believe the review process should be open between reviewers and authors”

GEARS

Awesome Engineering U

[Note: I know publishing a blog under a pen name is hypocritical while I readily give my name to the authors for which I am reviewing.]

However, I am curious, how do you think an Open-Open review process would affect young faculty members just starting out? Should they keep their principle or use the cover of peer review to their advantage? Is an Open-Open review process even a good idea?

Figures make the world go ‘round

One of the fundamental aspects of academic research is publishing. And it is the author’s responsibility to make things “relatively” easy for the reviewer. Aside from a terribly written paper, there’s nothing worse than referring to a figure/setup/design in the text that’s not there.

For example, I recently reviewed a paper where the authors described the design of a system and adjustments to an overall schematic, yet show no figure. Believe me, it definitely needed a figure. After trolling through two references, I managed to find said schematic but correlating the changes to the original was a pain. How hard would it have been to say “the extra widget here allows for more travel and this do-hickey’s placement was adjusted from a previous design [ref]. The updated schematic can be seen in Figure X”. That makes life a lot simpler for the reader reviewer. (Remember, no one’s going to read it if it doesn’t get past review…)

In this particular case, it was even more frustrating because the author (from their Scopus record) has numerous publications in reputable journals. If this was a graduate student working on their first publication, a reviewer like me might be a little bit more lenient. But from a seasoned author who presumably does reviews of their own, that kind of sloppiness is unacceptable.

I guess the one good thing about performing reviews is you get to vent, that is until things become transparent between authors and reviewers, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.