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.

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