bad refereeing is a *much* more serious problem than the fact that wrong papers get published every now and then. The bad guys in this game are not the poor authors trying to survive, but rather the retards who glance at a paper, realise that it is about some problem on which they have passed their final judgement long ago, and then write a dismissive rejection.

I’m glad somebody mentioned this. There’s another side to the refereeing coin, populated by people who have families to feed…

I find the most frustrating thing is papers that aren’t truly padding but also clearly contain just enough that’s new to qualify. The end result is that you get maybe an 8 page paper where 1 page is yet another motivation for a specific task, 1.5 pages is yet another review of how previous people have tackled this/similar problems, 1.5 pages is yet another description of the well known basic mathematical setup (so that the paper is reasonably “self contained”), .5 pages is yet another description of how the experiments were evaluated and why this is appropriate, 1 page is obvious conclusions and yet another listing of references most of which are the ones everyone uses. So 5.5 pages are “duplicating existing stuff”, leaving 2.5 pages of new stuff and experimental validation. Apart from anything else, it takes time and concentration to read those 5.5 pages to be sure they are “yet another …” and there’s not something new hidden within there.

I do wonder if there’s a better way these days to structure scientific/engineering literature these days than requiring every paper to be reasonably self-contained.

Maybe we could have a version of the arxiv in which people respond to papers with comments

About a couple years ago I remember seeing arXiv implementing a comment feature of some sort, or maybe just a way to send a trackback to an article, I don’t remember exactly. It were there for maybe a few weeks and then disappeared…

I constantly hear people complaining that anything gets published these days (despite that most probably do benefit from such lax standards); papers being rejected due to referee bias is a different problem from low-quality/unworthy papers not being rejected. That implies the traditional peer review process through journal publication is not working the way it should be, no? Yet in the end bad papers won’t survive the scrutiny after becoming public for long, or at least we hope that scientists weed them out, so why put too much emphasis on things getting “published”?

I guess we already do that to some extend by taking into account citations.

But If we look at the wild variation of reviews we receive from TAC/reviewers for mostly similar research proposals submitted in different years, it’s pretty clear that there really are no true standards as if science is in the eyes of beholders. Why put so much emphasis on a single person’s review then?

But in principle authors do that not to satisfy the referee only, but for their work to be accepted by the community at large, right? Scientific process naturally calls for peer reviews all the time, so a paper comes under real scrutiny after publication anyways, no? What is the real advantage of centralizing the refereeing process, when information is so abundant, and most people don

anticipating a critical reading makes authors more careful

But in principle authors do that not to satisfy the referee only, but for their work to be accepted by the community at large, right? Scientific process naturally calls for peer reviews all the time, so a paper comes under real scrutiny after publication anyways, no? What is the real advantage of centralizing the refereeing process, when information is so abundant, and most people don’t get info from books (= traditional journals) any more?

Maybe people really only read abstract and summary these days, so at least one person in the field needs to pay attention…

I guess Julianne got the paper. Do you have a desk that used to belong to somebody famous?

I changed the discussion because your absurd objections proved that the more slow witted readers wouldn’t see the brilliance and transcendant truthiness of my results.

I waited a year to re-submit because I wanted to give you time to adjust to the more intellectual air of Caltech and absorb some wisdom from your desk.
A vain effort, I see.
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A joke, of course. I have never written anything, even a parking ticket, likely to end up in Sean’s inbox.

Most papers on the arxiv are stupefyingly, paralyzingly boring. That, again, is much more of a problem than the appearance of wrong papers.

Look at it this way: I see here people whining about all the bad papers they have to referee. But what does that cost you, compared with what a rejection costs the victims of incompetent referees? And who forced you to be a referee in the first place?

When I agree to be a referee, my attitude is that I will not reject unless [a] it is very obvious that the author has nothing to say and is just padding his publication list — this is very rare in fact, or [b] I can show mathematically that there is a fatal error. I will certainly *not* reject a paper just because it conflicts with folklore about the subject, which seems to be the commonest ground for rejection, no doubt because it requires so little work.

Why does that matter? Multiple contradictory hypotheses are part of science. As long as every one knows that subfields X and Y produce mutually incompatible models of a particular system that are incapable of explaining each other’s data, it would be silly to reject papers that try to refine either model, as progress would never be made.

Incidentally, this was the case for the Earth’s mantle (the solid rock portion of the planet between 35 and 2900 km depth, for non geologists here) for much of the late 20th century. Geophysical models could not reproduce the chemical constraints, and geochemical models could not explain the physics.

But if every paper on the topic had been rejected because they didn’t explain everything, then the problem never would have been sorted out.

What

What’s the merit of the traditional peer review process now? With the Internet, it is so easy to let people in the world see whatever you want to put in public. Only people in the know read your papers anyways, so why not let them just decide which papers are worthy of better recognition?

As an author, it is impossible to publish anything even mildly original and against the grain.

Huh! The opposite is true as far as publishing in physics journals is concerned. The Referees will usually write a very positive report if you are original. They don’t really check the details in the article. So, if you have some nice original idea, your article will be accepted even if your detailed mathematical arguments are very sloppy

In mathematics journals they also welcome original ideas, but there you can expect a Referee report in which every misplaced comma will be mentioned

I have, on my todo list, a terrible paper. However, it has been on arxiv.org for 4-5 months now. Most of my colleagues and coauthors just send the paper to arxiv.org first, and then submit to the journal. The reader has become, in effect, the referee.

“The Astrophysical Journal has adopted a new policy that manuscript files become
inactive, and are considered to have been withdrawn, six months after the most
recent referee’s report goes to the authors, provided a revised version has not
been received by that time.”

Baby steps….