Yesterday I spent over 3 hours reviewing a paper for a journal, capping off a jam-packed day of semi-improvised discussions with high school students, grant proposal writing, a very tiny bit of lab work, and more. A friend of mine, coincidentally, also spent several hours yesterday reviewing a paper. This morning, I read a blog … Continue reading Peer Review, and Lying Injured on the Sidewalk
The bio-science journal eLife is trying out an remarkable new approach to peer review: letting authors decide how, or even whether, to revise their manuscripts in response to reviewers. The well-written announcements are here and here. I’m glad to see experimentation with new scientific publishing methods, though I’m skeptical about this one. Fundamentally, the new … Continue reading eLife’s Peer Review Experiment
I’ll guess that most people reading this don’t believe in homeopathy, astrology, or the existence of lizardlike extraterrestrials that walk among us. This is probably not because any of us ourselves have researched these topics, but rather because we are unconvinced by their proponents, and also perhaps because these ideas have not managed to break … Continue reading Scientific publishing for non-scientists
Two posts ago, I wondered about how long the average peer-review of a journal article takes to write. Most people I know reported “a few hours” as the average time, with the upper end of the range being a day or two. I emailed several journals — mostly ones that I’ve reviewed papers for or … Continue reading Review times revisited
There’s an interesting question about peer-review of journal articles that I’ve never seen addressed: How long does it take to review a paper? I don’t mean the three weeks or so between getting a request and submitting a review, but rather the time spent actually reviewing. In other words, how many hours does a reviewer … Continue reading In the future, my reviews will consist solely of one carefully picked emoji
The Eighteenth Elephant 