Peer reviewing

[Daniel Everett]

I completely agree with Bill here. And as I said earlier, I have editors take their role seriously and not merely pass along referee reports.

Having reviewed many articles and book ms over the years, I can say that there are always (!) places that the article needs to be *improved*, not merely changed. More than that, in most cases in my experience, including my own submitted pieces, the author almost always needs help, whether famous or beginning. 

If two people read your point and don't get it, then *you*, not they, are at fault.

And that doesn't even include points about style and clarity of writing. Science writing is by and large clunky and in need of some aesthetic improvement as well as more substantive advice on content.

Another example I like to give students is this. Back when I was a beginning graduate student in Brazil, I submitted articles to a couple of journals. Both editors, Dell Hymes and David Rood, wrote back polite messages that insinuated that I either wrote terribly or had little to say. The accompanying referee reports made these points even more forcefully.

David (then editor of IJAL) said in his letter that I clearly wasn't very good at writing, but that he was willing to help.

And he did. And a few years later, I was on the Editorial Board of IJAL. I learned a lot about writing from referees. I learned a lot about linguistics from them. And about my own shortcomings. 

These are lessons everybody needs and it is wrong to communicate in any way to students that their professors somehow just started generating major articles one day and that when referees disagree, the author is probably right. It is not a matter of the referees being better linguists or writers. It is a matter of their expertise coupled with their viewing of the ms as a stand-alone object, without access to the author's implicit information about what he/she intended to say or knows about the subject that they didn't say.

I also tell students that they should get used to taking exams if they want to be academics because every journal submission entails a thorough examination by one's peers.

Dan


On 1 Apr 2010, at 11:21, Bill Croft wrote:

> I think that eliminating the category of "revise and resubmit" is, in effect, saying that the author is always right, and the reviewers are always wrong. I don't share that view. Sometimes the author is right, as Martin has been saying in his messages, but sometimes the reviewers are right. I have always felt that my papers were improved after "revise and resubmit".
> 
> But this is where the editor's role comes in. The author doesn't see the reviewers' reports until the editor receives them and passes them on. At that point the editor may judge whether, in his/her view, the weight of the evidence supports the author's or the reviewers' perspective, and communicate this to the author (partly by choosing "revise and resubmit" or "accept upon revision"). Also, editors nowadays almost always ask the author to explain how and why s/he revised the manuscript upon resubmission. That allows the reviewers as well as the editor to judge whether the revisions are sufficient.
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
>> Bill Croft wrote:
>>> But the main value for "revise and resubmit" is that one doesn't know how much an author really will revise the manuscript. Not infrequently, I receive "revised" manuscripts which had significant problems where the author has merely added a few footnotes to the original submission. In those cases, I do feel that I have wasted my precious time, as Lachlan puts it, and I will recommend rejection.
>> What Bill describes as "the main value" of R&R is the main problem, in my view.
>> 
>> In the cases mentioned above, the author probably limited herself to adding a few footnotes because she simply didn't agree with the reviewer that "the manuscript had significant problems". And often the author is right, not the reviewer. Reviewers are not more knowledgeable than authors; in fact, they generally know much less about the paper's topic than the author.
>> 
>> But predicting whether the editor will overrule the reviewers or not is very difficult, so should the author resubmit? This is extremely tricky, and I think many papers are delayed because the author is at a loss what to do: Follow a reviewer's proposals she is unhappy with, or try a different journal?
>> 
>> So I think a new approach that only has "accept" and "reject" would make everybody's lives easier.
>> 
>> Martin
>