Peer reviewing

[Daniel Everett]

Dear Lachlan, Martin, and all,

One of the best published pieces I know of on journals, their shortcomings, and what is still right about the process is an old NLLT Topic-Comment piece written by the master of irony and witty prose, Geoff Pullum. The article is: Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1984) Stalking the perfect journal. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2, 261-267. (TOPIC...COMMENT series.)

In fact, while on the subtopic of GK Pullum, visit his website to see a list of his 250 publications, most of them in top journals: http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/pubs.html

This just shows that the referee process need not overly slow one's academic output. 

OK. The last two lines were unnecessary. But I couldn't resist.

Dan



On 1 Apr 2010, at 07:18, Lachlan Mackenzie wrote:

> 
> Dear all,
> As one of the general editors of Functions of Language, my sense is that the discussion is lacking in realism. Peer reviewers are, to me, the salt of the earth, hard-pressed academics who are prepared to give up some of their precious time to perform an act of charity, a close study of an anonymous manuscript by a perfect stranger and to deliver detailed comments. In my experience, the comments that are given are overwhelmingly fair and constructive and are an essential element in the process of helping authors develop from their first submission through to the final, publishable version. Very few articles are publishable in their original form (10% at most), and the great majority of authors are genuinely grateful for the feedback they receive. This applies to both the “revise and resubmit” (about 40%) and the “reject” categories (about 50%).
> The essential point is the role of the general editors. They are ultimately responsible for the quality of the material that appears in their journal and for the quality of the process between submission and publication/rejection. General editors should therefore not simply farm out the responsibility for the fate of an article to the peer reviewers. They should be familiar with and have formed a preliminary judgement on each article submitted so that they are in a position to advise the author on the status of the recommendations of the reviewers. General editors should also be prepared to negotiate with the author about how the revision should be carried out: slavish implementation of reviewers' recommendations is not the goal, and reviewers will understand that too. What we want to achieve (and generally do) is a published article that is satisfactory to the author and to the general editors, and in which the reviewers can trace the impact of their suggestions for improvement; I reject the suggestion that the result is some kind of insipid compromise. Needless to day, good journal management means that every effort is made to keep the process, for all its valuable complexity, as quick as possible.
> As for anonymity (double-blind reviewing), I believe that anything that will help persuade highly qualified colleagues to do a review is welcome. There are other and better ways for linguists to criticize each other (for example in peer-reviewed articles!). 
> Lachlan
> 
> 
> Prof. J. Lachlan Mackenzie
> 
> 
> Researcher at ILTEC -- Honorary Professor at VU University -- Editor of Functions of Language -- Research Manager of SCIMITAR
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