3 ms·

Because I don't want to spend two years fighting the second referee when she's fundamentally misunderstood the point of my paper. I'm no longer in academia. Ei

Because I don't want to spend two years fighting the second referee when she's fundamentally misunderstood the point of my paper. I'm no longer in academia. Either take what I put up on arxiv or leave it. I _really_ don't care.

s0rce 3y ago
While not always true my metric for clear/understandable is for other people to understand it. This usually supports my argument when people show me a document and I have no idea what its saying, they argue its perfectly clear... my definition was for people other than the author to grasp the intended meaning.
- Muller20 3y ago
  Peer review goes beyond simple issues about clarity or misunderstanding. In particular, peer review is sometimes seen as an adversarial process. Often, the reviewer will not understand because he is not the intended audience. Other times, he will understand but he just doesn't like your method, because he is working in an opposite direction. Or maybe your method is a direct competitor of his and yours work better, which incentivizes some people to block your work.
  - wrycoder 3y ago
    Or your paper goes against the current paradigm or is otherwise politically unpalatable.
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  - anticensor 3y ago
    > Other times, he will understand but he just doesn't like your method, because he is working in an opposite direction. Or maybe your method is a direct competitor of his and yours work better, which incentivizes some people to block your work. Oh you mean those phantom "off topic"/"out of scope" reviews.
- bumby 3y ago
  If the intended audience is reading it, I would agree. However, many reviewers seem to be assigned and agree to review a topic that they are ill-equipped to understand without a substantial amount of background knowledge. A good reviewer in this situation will review the referenced papers to bolster their understanding. A bad reviewer will expect everything to be spelled out within the manuscript, and, unfortunately, the length limits often don't permit that kind of write-up.
  - queuebert 3y ago
    Precisely. The continued hyperspecialization of science shrinks the potential pool of qualified reviewers to zero. I rarely get knowledgeable reviews these days. Instead of disputing my methods, they complain about the font or figure styles, or raise questions that weren't answered in the paper because they are common knowledge in the field.
matwood 3y ago
You actually touch on an interesting point. Is peer review still necessary? When there is limited journal space, sure. But now that we have effectively unlimited space, let it be reviewed when people go to cite it. We've already seen a lot of peer reviewed papers be retracted later, so should we just accept the reality?
- dazed_confused 3y ago
  Yes. The crap people publish even with peer-reviews is bad enough. A few subfields in CS have bitten a couple times by relying on non peer reviewed ecosystems.
- gwerbret 3y ago
  Peer review is the backbone of journals, and (some) journals serve an absolutely critical function in academia: they increase the signal:noise ratio. Most of what is published is noise; without the curation provided by (certain) journals, anything of significance is very likely to be drowned out. As a casual example in the biomedical sciences, the Journal of Biological Chemistry has an output of ~30,000 pages per year, most of which is 'noise'. That's just ONE journal. The journal Cell, on the other hand, has an order of magnitude less, most of which is 'signal'. EDIT: This is not to say the peer review approach doesn't need work, and lots of it. The whole current approach to research needs an overhaul. I'm just saying it's a bit hasty to throw the baby out with the bath water.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Peer review is an important signal to potential citers. If everyone has to fully read and understand every paper in order to (responsibly) cite it, there's gonna be a lot less research. Given the exposure of how much bad research there is, maybe there does need to be a slowing and focus on quality, but I think we still need peer review, although it definitely need to be reformed somehow because it's clearly broken. We need to take a serious look at the incentive structure in academia because it's not guaranteeing the scientific results that we expected it to. I don't think we should just abandon the system though.
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

s0rce 3y ago

While not always true my metric for clear/understandable is for other people to understand it. This usually supports my argument when people show me a document and I have no idea what its saying, they argue its perfectly clear... my definition was for people other than the author to grasp the intended meaning.

Muller20 3y ago
Peer review goes beyond simple issues about clarity or misunderstanding. In particular, peer review is sometimes seen as an adversarial process. Often, the reviewer will not understand because he is not the intended audience. Other times, he will understand but he just doesn't like your method, because he is working in an opposite direction. Or maybe your method is a direct competitor of his and yours work better, which incentivizes some people to block your work.
- wrycoder 3y ago
  Or your paper goes against the current paradigm or is otherwise politically unpalatable.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- anticensor 3y ago
  > Other times, he will understand but he just doesn't like your method, because he is working in an opposite direction. Or maybe your method is a direct competitor of his and yours work better, which incentivizes some people to block your work. Oh you mean those phantom "off topic"/"out of scope" reviews.
bumby 3y ago
If the intended audience is reading it, I would agree. However, many reviewers seem to be assigned and agree to review a topic that they are ill-equipped to understand without a substantial amount of background knowledge. A good reviewer in this situation will review the referenced papers to bolster their understanding. A bad reviewer will expect everything to be spelled out within the manuscript, and, unfortunately, the length limits often don't permit that kind of write-up.
- queuebert 3y ago
  Precisely. The continued hyperspecialization of science shrinks the potential pool of qualified reviewers to zero. I rarely get knowledgeable reviews these days. Instead of disputing my methods, they complain about the font or figure styles, or raise questions that weren't answered in the paper because they are common knowledge in the field.

matwood 3y ago

You actually touch on an interesting point. Is peer review still necessary? When there is limited journal space, sure. But now that we have effectively unlimited space, let it be reviewed when people go to cite it. We've already seen a lot of peer reviewed papers be retracted later, so should we just accept the reality?

dazed_confused 3y ago
Yes. The crap people publish even with peer-reviews is bad enough. A few subfields in CS have bitten a couple times by relying on non peer reviewed ecosystems.
gwerbret 3y ago
Peer review is the backbone of journals, and (some) journals serve an absolutely critical function in academia: they increase the signal:noise ratio. Most of what is published is noise; without the curation provided by (certain) journals, anything of significance is very likely to be drowned out. As a casual example in the biomedical sciences, the Journal of Biological Chemistry has an output of ~30,000 pages per year, most of which is 'noise'. That's just ONE journal. The journal Cell, on the other hand, has an order of magnitude less, most of which is 'signal'. EDIT: This is not to say the peer review approach doesn't need work, and lots of it. The whole current approach to research needs an overhaul. I'm just saying it's a bit hasty to throw the baby out with the bath water.
freedomben 3y ago
Peer review is an important signal to potential citers. If everyone has to fully read and understand every paper in order to (responsibly) cite it, there's gonna be a lot less research. Given the exposure of how much bad research there is, maybe there does need to be a slowing and focus on quality, but I think we still need peer review, although it definitely need to be reformed somehow because it's clearly broken. We need to take a serious look at the incentive structure in academia because it's not guaranteeing the scientific results that we expected it to. I don't think we should just abandon the system though.
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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