4 ms·

Yup exactly correct. I've also been a reviewer from time to time on various ACM and IEEE papers and there are clearly authors who are trying to get reviewed by

Yup exactly correct. I've also been a reviewer from time to time on various ACM and IEEE papers and there are clearly authors who are trying to get reviewed by their 'friends' rather than by objective reviewers. And there is also reviewer biases, I reviewed a paper where one of the other reviewers was extremely harsh, and that reviewer turned out to have a stake in the outcome. Now a good journal is supposed to curate these sorts of conflicts of interest but my experience is that isn't always the case.

elcritch 7y ago
To be cynical, sorting through conflicts of interests would take more effort and Elsevier wouldn’t find that profitable. More realistically running an unbiased journal will always be difficult unless human nature changes significantly. Nevertheless it’s still worthwhile to do. Same as you, I’ve had reviewers reject research based on a reviewer’s stake in the outcome, and also had good reviews with constructive feedback. As a reviewer I’ve also helped "tear apart" an article that had good results but was poorly structured to help them clean up their article.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  Getting a harsh review stings but the (normally) impartial feedback can be invaluable. I've come to believe that only by learning how to pass your articles by peer review do you learn how to write a good article.
- Nemo_bis 7y ago
  Even in medical research, legacy publishers do precious little to respect even the very modest standards of the field for the disclosure of conflict of interest. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/9/7/e029796.full.pdf https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/9/7/e029796.full.pdf