This definition is too restrictive. Bad reviews are ones where the reviewer
is incompetent to judge the quality of the paper, as well as ones which are
simply corrupt (rejecting a paper to steal the ideas, punishing an enemy,
etc.). Some are simply off base because the reviewer doesn't understand his
job. I once wrote a paper on fisheries which a leading scientist (OK, I'll
boast, it was David Cushing) praised as a "seminal contribution", and which
an engineer rejected as a simple application of linear systems theory (which
it was). The editor desperately asked me for a response, but I simply wrote
back that he had to decide whether the readers of the Journal of the
Fisheries Research Board of Canada were fisheries scientists or linear
systems theorists. The paper was published, I am happy to say.
Many reviewers have their own agendas, and they should not be allowed to
corrupt the process because of this. I think that editors should make it
clear what they expect reviewers to do and should try to judge whether they
have done their jobs correctly. Rejecting a paper because the work was done
poorly is one thing, rejecting it because you don't like the results is
another.
I'll throw in a comment about anonymity. If you receive a paper that cites
half a dozen papers by Silvert, I wrote it, becaue no one else cites me. And
if your paper is rejected because you ignored the important work of Silvert,
you can assume that I reviewed it. Unfortunately the only authors or
reviewers who are anonymous are ones unknown to each other because they are
in different fields, and should not be reviewing each others' work. More and
more I find myself being sent papers that I am not competent to review, and
in fact I cannot even understand the title and abstract (I of course refuse
these). Unless the editors make more of an effort to make sure that
reviewers are the right people for the job and are doing what they should,
the concept of peer review threatens to become a farce.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Greenberg" <greenb...@ucdavis.edu>
To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU>
Sent: terça-feira, 2 de Março de 2010 21:40
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Are reviews anonymous?
I want to clarify a point: I don't mean that a "bad review" is one in
which your paper is rejected, a "bad review" I define a bad review as
one that does little to help improve a paper that may have potential.
