50 Here’s something for those of us that go to some of the haughtier and more reputed schools:
I was visiting a friend out at one of those smaller “less regarded” schools a bit back and was taking a tour of his lab. Nice stuff in there, you know. These lesser known schools seem to do alright for themselves, thank you very much. Anyway, upon his desk I saw an unpublished – out for review – JACS communication written by a nanothingiee group we both are quite familiar with. Indeed, the lead author we distinctly recalled. Waaaaaayyy back at the ACS in San Fran at the poster session, we were walking around and introduced ourselves to this guy standing in front of his poster. Now… old boy (a graduate student) engaged us in some dialog about his poster and we were getting along famously, my friend asking most of the intelligent questions (I was still recovering from giving blood a few hours before and drinking multiple beers immediately after.) As conversations normally flow, he asked us where we were from. I told him my fine institution and my buddy told him his. I assume he wasn’t put off my by school, but the look on his face when my buddy told him where he was from was at first a “are you serious” chuckle, which melted into one of those “do they have a department” and finally to a resound, “I’m done with you.”
I stood there and watched it the whole time. So, my buddy being naive to the ways of the world, kept asking questions but the answers weren’t forthcoming any more. In fact, in the midst of a question my buddy was asking, the guy actually walked away from his poster and started talking to his friends.
Long story short, the guy’s JACS comm is sitting on his desk. His boss isn’t sure if he wants to accept it and wanted to get a feeling from one of his students. I know, for a fact, he’s too good of a person to allow his personal feelings for the asshole bog down his scientific judgment… but it’s a worthwhile lesson. Even at small unknown schools like Mississippi, they still review papers for top journals… so… try not to piss off the locals. Some of us remember you and remember your names and we too get first crack at reviewing an article.
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Superiority complexes are tied to nanochemistry. Its “live fast, get rich quick, dupe NSF panels, die young attitude” will be the cause of many more rejected JCAS papers in the future. And it can’t come sooner.
In other news, double blind reviewing is ‘in’. Especially since I’ve recently heard of a case of a paper being rejected where a more famous guy who got less results and had fewer conclusions got it accepted into JCAS a month later. I assume the same Assistant Editor was involved with both papers.
wow, you really have a chip on your shoulder against nanochemists. That’s not to say that some of your criticisms are without merit- while I still think that Mirkin comm we were arguing about last week or so was JACS-worthy, it can seem sometimes that bigger names get into bigger journals more easily. But I find this to be more true, at least in nanoscience, in Science and Nature than in JACS.
Actually, I think angewandte is even worse when it comes to name recognition than any other journal.
Not really anything against nanochemists, just a certain subset of them. I really like the research of the nanodude in my department, and sometimes I ask him questions about it. But that’s because he’s realistic about his technology’s prospects and comes out with stuff that has real world relevance, but unfortunately, happens to be based on ‘nano’tubes.
Most of the initial research into fullerenes and nanotubes in the early 00s always seemed like snake-oil to me. The wished-for advances never justified the humongous amount of money invested. I’d rather another basic science field got it (not even my own).
Besides, my comment was meant as a cheap, pointless jab at nanochemistry, made behind a cowardly anonymous username, that most will find funny, and some infuriating. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.
I disagree that Andjewandte has worse ‘big name recognition’ syndrome than JCAS. To me it’s about equal — at least in my field, which we have by now established, is not nanoscience. They both have their established names, where a big group will only publish in one of them to the exclusion of the other. However, as an example, Jean Marie Basset and co. can navigate both of them pretty well with alkane metathesis. Actually, it does result in them repeating certain things from one journal to another, but never in the same journal. To me, that just says that Associate Editors (or reviewers), fail to read the competition.
double blind reviewing is ‘in’
While this sounds like a great idea, I don’t think this would actually work – if you scan the first ten or 15 references of a paper, you can usually figure out what group it came from…
Any other thoughts about how editors could ‘fix’ some of the problems associated with peer review?
Scanning the references will allow you to infer, but it won’t leave you with a conclusive answer. Not to mention, people usually pile on “big names” in the beginning of their references.
The names, institutions, etc. should be omitted from the paper when they are handed out. People can be left to guess all they want, they’ll never be able to conclusively know, unless they happen to know the guy and know the research. I mean, it’s easy enough to figure out who wrote a review – but it’s impossible to know for sure.
Indeed, I don’t even think the Associate editor should have that information. Each paper should be assigned a number in the Editor’s office before it’s sent out to associate editors.
I’m all for taking the anti-Paul approach. There should be as little transparency in the review process as possible.
I amend that by saying when people write “We have recently demonstrated” and then they reference them self… that’s basically a dead ringer. So, it won’t work in EVERY situation… I guess.
While scanning the references isn’t a sure thing, I’d still argue that people’s tendency to self cite (and the way they write their papers, as you mentioned in your next comment) would give you a very high probability of correctly guessing who the author is.
But even if that wasn’t true, I think you’re underestimating how much is already known about a manuscript in the community before it goes out to referees – since professors often talk about unpublished work (at GRCs, when visiting other schools, with their friends/co-workers/ex-advisors, etc.) and since their students give poster presentations at open/closed meetings, a surprisingly large number of potential referees have already heard about a particular paper (or could easily identify what group it came from, solely based on the data presented in the paper) before it is published/when it is sent out for review.
So I think the ‘little transparency’ system you’re advocating would actually reward PIs that didn’t talk about unpublished work and would potentially penalize PIs that did (as they’d be less likely to experience a ‘fully anonymous’ round of review…)
Yes, these are all obvious problems that would work against an anonymous system of review. It wouldn’t be hard to surmise who wrote a paper. I’m not certain how to overcome them but, I think, you’re giving too little credit to psychology. If Whiteside’s or Evan’s or Sharples’s name isn’t on the paper even if you suspect it is their work I think people will be more likely to treat it like it was some smaller research group and more apprehensive about “punishing” people they think are assholes when they can’t be certain.
Social engineering, you know. The behavior of people sometimes makes for unobvious results. It would be worth trying, in any regard, since I don’t see how it would hurt.
“I think you’re underestimating how much is already known about a manuscript in the community before it goes out to referees – since professors often talk about unpublished work (at GRCs, when visiting other schools, with their friends/co-workers/ex-advisors, etc.)”
And once again, that just proves my point in that this idea would only help those starting off in their career, but will not do much to harm those whose names are easily guessed. Assistant profs don’t get to shoot the breeze that often at conferences and GRCs anyways. Never mind their grad students. And if you’re in Pd catalysis, you can forget about reviewers ever guessing who you are if the name isn’t on paper, even if you do go to every conceivable conference.
“would actually reward PIs that didn’t talk about unpublished work and would potentially penalize PIs that did”
I doubt it would create a culture of secrecy that would harm the scientific enterprise and the spirit of openness. For one thing, it was never there in the first place (that spirit) for many, and the befits that I see clearly outweigh the small risks. No many in my field talks about unpublished work unless it’s been submitted. That’s how I got ’sort of’ scooped a couple of months ago.
Double blind reviewing is not penalizing anyone. As far as I see it, too many people are already unfairly penalized, and if this practice can lift that from about 50% of them, or at least 20%, then so much the better.
I think you’re wrong. It would be easy to guess for some groups. For example, only this group uses this family of ligands, or only this group uses these fluorophores. But it would be impossible to tell which group it is (at least for the other reviewers) if two are working with similar reagents, or one is known to switch often. It would also really help out new assistant professors, and the aforementioned groups who only work with a certain kind of ligand or fluorophore, would not mind that much that their papers are not really ‘blind’.
I have a good recent example actually… The Science paper by Christina White that came out a month and a half ago. When I read it, no way I could have been able to tell it was from her group, her chemistry is completely different!
Yet, I also know two profs who dislike her with a passion. I think they might hate her on some sort of personal level (”cocky woman!” or “cocky new assistant prof” — or some such) and if they got the paper for review, they could have sunk it if they knew the name (”this is old Fenton chemistry, even the references mention there is nothing new here! Not Science material! They must have tried hundreds of substrates before finding ones that look good”). It’s pretty obvious to me that these people did not get this particular Science paper for review. If they got it without knowing the authors’ names though, it would be a different story. All in all, it was a pretty good Science paper.
Yup. If you see an acene with a trialkylsilylacetylene tacked on…there’s a good chance I know who made it.
I doubt that.
Mitch
No, they had a party once. It was good times. I wasn’t invited.
There are two events that have the potential for Big-Name-Bias— (1) amongst the editors when they decide to send a manuscript out for review and (2) amongst the peer reviewers.
It would be easier to test this bias by making the Nature Journal triage process (1) blind because there are fewer editors than peer reviewers, and the editors do not ostensibly have anything to gain from the outcome.
It would be easier to test this bias by making the Nature Journal triage process (1) blind …
This would be problematic – when choosing referees, you need to know who is on the paper so that you don’t ask someone’s Ph.D. supervisor or collaborator to review the work by accident (and so you make sure you don’t contact someone who is working on the exact same problem or someone who may have a potential conflict of interest…) This is especially important for papers that result from a collaboration from several groups (more PIs, more potential referees need to be excluded…)
Sorry, I should have been more precise with my wording.
I was speaking about the process that occurs when the journal editors decide if a paper should be sent out for peer review, or be rejected outright because it is too specialized.
My impression is that the famous researchers know many of the editors–or the editors know of them by reputation–and hence could have an advantage in this part of the triage process.
I know, I know, write a good cover letter. But, still….
just because a reader may sometimes/often guess the authors, that’s no reason to *tell* him or her the authors every time.
i believe in double-blind or full disclosure of the authors AND the reviewers.
Yes. I don’t care about the guy. I’ll tell you what. I’m sure if I dig hard enough, I’ll find that this work has been done in some way before and I feel a bit more motivated to look right now than usual… for some reason.
On the other hand, I was once asked to review a paper for one of my committee members who had less expertise in the field than I asked to review for. This paper came from a less-than-well-known institution in Europe.
I didn’t bother commenting on the poor grammar — that was excuasable on account of the nation of origin. But there were graphs without axis labels, generally poor experimental technique, and I wasn’t even sure why they were doing the experiment.
But yeah. Well known institutions also do pointless experiments, but at least (i think) they remember to put axis labels on their graphs.
your a sexist bastard for suggesting that a female supervisor would take comments less seriously than a male supervisor.
Damn, that completely missed me. Where does anyone say that? I looked for it all over, but I must have missed it. Provide a quoted statement! Not that it’s anything important, I just read over the entire post and couldn’t find anything so I wasted five minutes and got worried… that my sexdar isn’t working properly. Sorry, sexistdar or, erm… never mind. Damn I need a coffee.
In other news, my acetone-d6 has some really weird shit in it. I have six strange extra peaks and it’s totally freaking me out. My compound is there, but what the hell is all that other crap!? I knew I should have told the undergrads not to contaminate deuterated solvents for the fourth time. Why did I think that three times would be enough!!? Whyyyyyyyyyy!????
Oh, I figured the sex thing out while writing that and looking at the spectrum, and screaming ‘Whyyyyyy!??’ at the top of my lungs (no one else in the lab right now, so permissible). It was in the poll. Kyle should have done his/her instead of switching it up from one question to another.
No. Kyle shouldn’t have. There was nothing sexist in the post or in the poll. I assume pi* was joking but anyone seriously extrapolating something out of it can seriously suck my balls for being such a crazy fucktard.
That’s o.k. I was joking too. But I usally always say his/her in all my ‘official’ writings, just in case. Most people can’t stand to write that way though.
By the rules of English, I believe it’s appropriate to use the masculine every time. his/her isn’t correct English. The slash isn’t a punctuation mark!
I forgot about ‘that’ rule. But then again, we speak ‘American’ around these here parts. Tell that to the Queen of England and tell him/her to shove it.
when insulting a monarch, just watch out so that you don’t end up on the scaffolding – next to a hangman/hangwoman
I believe it’s a “hangperson”
I’d be really happy if the English language could pick up some ungendered pronouns.
a clunky alternative is “they”
They tried that with ‘re’ if i remember correctly. It didn’t catch on. I think English has a problem in general with being abstract.
I suggest kitty for an ungendered pronoun. I went to kitty’s birthday party. Kitty needed to go to the store.
But then, in countries that speak the Queen’s English, wouldn’t the pronoun become pussy? Hmm, that could be quite interesting…
I have seen kids and profs at Harvard quite up close, spending time in 3 groups there (and being fired from all of them). As you know they are pretty good as whole but not every one is a genius – in fact most of them are quite normal chemists – above average but not tremendously earth-shattering.
What they have going is a positive spiral – good stuff snowballing on past success, good funding, well-organized groups doing a research in aperticular direction for many years so they get farther than anybody else, and so on. Genius is only a small portion of it.
What was rather off-putting there was the tremendous conceit of maybe 30% chemistry students there (and some profs, of course). I mean, some of these dudes really take themselves seriously. Actually the students with the least impressive knowledge often have the most fragile ego. You start asking questions about someones project and as soon as you suggest some chemistry this is taken as an insult – They are senious and earned their right to give somebody a chemistry suggestion, not th other way around.
The chemistry group mentality and style greatly differs depending on the prof but one asshole who is a senior student can set the cadet-school-hazing mentality for the rest of the lab.
As for the article review: If it was me I would take really magnifiyng glass and dig out all “reasonable question” stuff and made them to re-writte and add stuff in their supplementary info. That would teach them, the snotty bastards
“You start asking questions about someones project and as soon as you suggest some chemistry this is taken as an insult – They are senious and earned their right to give somebody a chemistry suggestion, not th other way around.”
Exaaactly, total pet peeve of mine. How is it that some people end up in science research, of all professions, when they are unable to engage in any conversation / debate whatsoever without foaming at the mouth in indignation that they are shocked, SHOCKED that anyone would dare to question them? Craziness.
Some of our grad students get asked to review papers, by journal editors. Of course, they’re not chemists.
The big vs small school thing annoys me. It exists in the UK too, and in Canada. You’re point, that the folks in small schools review papers too, so be nice, is the perfect antidote to small school snobbery.
Be nice to people on the way up, because you’ll meet them on your way down.
— Wilson Mizner
db
this reminds me “If you go to other people’s funerals they’ll be sure to come to yours”
I am surprised that many people would allow their students to review unpublished results. That seems like it is asking for some sort of Paquette-like situation to explode.
Our boss, a JACS editor, constantly gives insider stories on the review process, and students reviewing papers instead of faculty are one of his personal pet peeves. Sufficed to say, we are not privy to what papers are on his desk.
Isn’t part of the graduate experience a learning process whereby the PI hands a real article and offers you the opportunity to do a real review?
I mean… we don’t work with fake chemicals in a mock-up of a chemistry lab – why should we simulate reviewing a journal article when we can do the real thing?
For that matter – if your boss doesn’t trust grad students enough not to steal shit from journal articles they’re reviewing for their boss, why trust them with any data at all ever?
It only takes one sociopath sleeper-agent graduate student to infiltrate a research group, maintain a low profile for a couple of years and then produce a paper’s worth of bogus data or to use stolen data for their own gain to destroy the boss’s career.
The option of “Yes, and our decisions are essentially his” seems to imply that the student is entirely responsible for the reviewer’s response. There’s no problem if the paper is accepted, but what happens if the paper is rejected and it gets back to the author that a second-year graduate student’s opinion cost him the paper, regardless of how valid the opinion was?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with letting a student review a paper, in my opinion, it is a good exercise as you point out. Provided that the adviser is not just passing off the entire decision to a student, and makes their own decision.
It just seemed to me nowadays with plagiarism and bogus data on everyone’s radar, that people would be more concerned about the slight chance that a student turns out to be insane and play it on the so-called safe side.
Be sure to specify in your next cover-letter that your currently unpublished years of research be distributed to as many random students as possible.
Perhaps that is a fair admonition for not having postdocs review papers, but the likelihood that a grad student will steal an idea from a paper in review and turn it around into a career-building paper before the original gets published is very low. What with the expectation of doing a postdoc.
“There’s no problem if the paper is accepted, but what happens if the paper is rejected and it gets back to the author that a second-year graduate student’s opinion cost him the paper, regardless of how valid the opinion was?”
The peer review process is usually a merger of multiple opinions. Assuming a second year graduate student’s opinion was the deciding factor, that suggests that it was either eloquent and insightful enough to beat two “seasoned researchers” who missed something, or in concurrence with others in the field.
If the reviewed has a problem with that — well then, suck it up. Write a better paper which doesn’t have holes you can drive a n00b grad student through.
I don’t know. When it comes to the technical aspects of a paper, if they’re so poorly drawn a second year grad student can find them, then your paper sucks. For instance, the first paper my boss asked me to review was so awful… it was… just…
In the end, it has to be the PI’s call. Otherwise peer review has taken a bizarre slant which involves trainees. But I think it’s great practice and a lot of fun to review other people’s work, make a call, and see if the boss agrees. It lends itself to intelligent scientific discussion with the PI, which helps everyone.
Learning experience: We got assignment to take a significant (mechanistically-based) article of our own choice and point out weak parts like a reviewer would.
>Does your boss allow grad students to review papers?
>
>”Yes, and our decisions are essentially his”
Seems unlikely unless your ideas jive. Do you have access to your
boss’s reviewer account?
In reviewing papers I have been spoiled by my boss, we argue and
fight tooth and nail over reviewing manuscripts. I think this is
good for the reviewing process, because sometimes I win.
I went to school at Whatsamatta U as far as chemistry goes. I have found chemistry pretty congenial; I was never dissed by anyone from any school, though a particular prof (who I eventually hit it off with fine) from an institution with initials that rhyme with MIP was a little bit of an asshole once.
I gave him some feedback in the tone and idiom my Scots-Irish heritage is famous for, along with the best ‘crazy eyes’ I could muster. Being ivy covered shouldn’t protect anyone from being asked pointed, even ugly questions if need be. And I don’t think anyone should tolerate rudeness without heaving it back if it is outside the science. Ivy-covered poop still smells like poop.
Being an anonymous nobody from nowhere is pretty handy when you need to give someone a talking-to.