5 ms·

Adam Grant once related an amusing rejection from a double-blind review. One of the reviewers justified the rejection with something along the lines of “The aut

by bumby 2y ago

Adam Grant once related an amusing rejection from a double-blind review. One of the reviewers justified the rejection with something along the lines of “The author would do well to familiarize themselves with the work of Adam Grant”

Upvoter33 2y ago
This also happens pretty commonly. However, it's not even unreasonable! Sometimes you write a paper and you don't do a good enough of a job putting in the context of your own related work.
- CrazyStat 2y ago
  And sometimes the reviewer didn't read carefully and doesn't understand what you're doing. I once wrote a paper along the lines of "look we can do X blazingly fast, which (among other things) lets us put it inside a loop and do it millions of times to do Y." A reviewer responded with "I don't understand what the point of doing X fast is if you're just going to put it in a loop and make it slow again." He also asked us to run simulations to compare our method to another paper which was doing an unrelated thing Z. The editor agreed that we could ignore his comments.
Nevermark 2y ago
Yes, funny the first time. Not so much the fifth!
orthoxerox 2y ago
Life imitates art. In a 1986 comedy "Back to School" Rodney Dangerfield's character delegates his college assignments to various subject matter experts. His English Lit teacher berates him for it, saying that not only did he obviously cheat, but he also copied his essay from someone who's unfamiliar with the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Of course, the essay was written by Vonnegut himself, appearing in a cameo role.
Metacelsus 2y ago
I, as a reviewer, made a similar mistake once! The author's initial version seemed to contradict one of their earlier papers but I was missing some context.
- selfmodruntime 2y ago
  I also made this mistake! I recommended the author to read an adjacent work, which turned out to be by the very same author. He had just forgot to include it his work.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    I’ve had it happen to me. Paper rejected because it was copying and not citing a prior message to a mailing list… the message from the mailing list was mine, and the paper was me turning it into a proper publication.
Cheer2171 2y ago
Fair warning: I don't know enough about mathematics to say if this is the case here. I hear this all the time, but this is actually a real phenomenon that happens when well-known senior figures are rightfully cautious about over-citing their own work and/or are just so familiar with their own work that they don't include much of it in their literature review. For everybody else in the field, it's obvious that the work of famous person X should make up a substantial chunk of the lit review and be explicit about how the new work builds on X's prior literally paradigm shifting work. You can do a bad job at writing about your own past work for a given audience for so many different reasons, and many senior academics do all the time, making their work literally indistinguishable from that of graduate students --- hence the rejection.
- bumby 2y ago
  I totally understand the case when an author doesn't sufficiently give context because they are so close to their previous work that they take it for granted that it's obvious (or, like you said, they are wary of auto-citation). I may be misremembering, but I believe the case with Grant was that the referee was using his own work to discredit his submission. Ie "If the author was aware of the work of Adam Grant, they would understand why the submitted work is wrong."
GuB-42 2y ago
Play devil's advocate here. Human memory is not flawless, and people makes mistakes, so maybe Adam Grant should have read one of his previous work as a refresher. Even if not wrong, it is possible that he missed some stuff he thought he had published, but hadn't. If, as a developer, you had the experience of looking at some terrible code, angrily searching for whoever wrote that monstrosity, only to realize that you did, that's the idea.

by bumby 2y ago

Upvoter33 2y ago

This also happens pretty commonly. However, it's not even unreasonable! Sometimes you write a paper and you don't do a good enough of a job putting in the context of your own related work.

CrazyStat 2y ago
And sometimes the reviewer didn't read carefully and doesn't understand what you're doing. I once wrote a paper along the lines of "look we can do X blazingly fast, which (among other things) lets us put it inside a loop and do it millions of times to do Y." A reviewer responded with "I don't understand what the point of doing X fast is if you're just going to put it in a loop and make it slow again." He also asked us to run simulations to compare our method to another paper which was doing an unrelated thing Z. The editor agreed that we could ignore his comments.

Nevermark 2y ago

Yes, funny the first time. Not so much the fifth!

orthoxerox 2y ago

Life imitates art. In a 1986 comedy "Back to School" Rodney Dangerfield's character delegates his college assignments to various subject matter experts. His English Lit teacher berates him for it, saying that not only did he obviously cheat, but he also copied his essay from someone who's unfamiliar with the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Of course, the essay was written by Vonnegut himself, appearing in a cameo role.

Metacelsus 2y ago

I, as a reviewer, made a similar mistake once! The author's initial version seemed to contradict one of their earlier papers but I was missing some context.

selfmodruntime 2y ago
I also made this mistake! I recommended the author to read an adjacent work, which turned out to be by the very same author. He had just forgot to include it his work.
- adastra22 2y ago
  I’ve had it happen to me. Paper rejected because it was copying and not citing a prior message to a mailing list… the message from the mailing list was mine, and the paper was me turning it into a proper publication.

Cheer2171 2y ago

Fair warning: I don't know enough about mathematics to say if this is the case here. I hear this all the time, but this is actually a real phenomenon that happens when well-known senior figures are rightfully cautious about over-citing their own work and/or are just so familiar with their own work that they don't include much of it in their literature review. For everybody else in the field, it's obvious that the work of famous person X should make up a substantial chunk of the lit review and be explicit about how the new work builds on X's prior literally paradigm shifting work. You can do a bad job at writing about your own past work for a given audience for so many different reasons, and many senior academics do all the time, making their work literally indistinguishable from that of graduate students --- hence the rejection.

bumby 2y ago
I totally understand the case when an author doesn't sufficiently give context because they are so close to their previous work that they take it for granted that it's obvious (or, like you said, they are wary of auto-citation). I may be misremembering, but I believe the case with Grant was that the referee was using his own work to discredit his submission. Ie "If the author was aware of the work of Adam Grant, they would understand why the submitted work is wrong."

GuB-42 2y ago

Play devil's advocate here. Human memory is not flawless, and people makes mistakes, so maybe Adam Grant should have read one of his previous work as a refresher. Even if not wrong, it is possible that he missed some stuff he thought he had published, but hadn't. If, as a developer, you had the experience of looking at some terrible code, angrily searching for whoever wrote that monstrosity, only to realize that you did, that's the idea.