The crying game
Every so often, we get letters like the one below:
"Sadly I don't agree with you, the work was already acknowledge by the ... community and got a keystone scholarship. I am working in the field for more then 12 years, I think it is important and novel to so it will get a far review. I think that science and importance has nothing to do with your decision, I am sure that if this work was coming from a different lab, with a different PI sending it it was treated differentially and get a far chance and reviewed. Not surprising, I am not the only scientist that think that reviewing is about politics. Thanks for the time and consideration, I am sure this is the last manuscript I am sending to your Journal."
What can I say? Our internal review process is not about politics. What benefit would we obtain from rejecting a good paper? This is not to say that we don't make mistakes, but I can categorically say that we don't like it when we make them. And if the paper had come from a different lab, the outcome would have been the same. As I hinted in my previous post, we sometimes turn down papers from very accomplished scientists.
Now, if there are scientific arguments to challenge our decisions, we'd love to hear them, as we sometimes do reverse them. But as I said before, angry letters like the one above don't really do much for us.
Now, about this being "the last manuscript", is that a promise?
Comments
This is a very interesting human phenomenon. All of us, especially those in the academic community, get so attached to an idea or a project that it becomes a personal insult if someone criticizes or rejects it. But to play the devil's advocate for both sides: politics does play a role in reviewing and accepting papers. I suppose another word for this is credentials. If you had money to blow on a boombox and you had to choose between a Sony and a no-name product, would you go for the Sony or the latter? Is there really any guarantee that the Sony won't break down? Will the warranty cover the cost of the phone calls, gas spent on taking the thing back to the store or the trust you lose everytime this happens? No, but we go with the quality we EXPECT from a name. Brand quality is not an insignificant thing. So it may be that as my Biochem prof used to say, there have been very experienced bigshots who have submitted papers with mislabeled and even fabricated data and it has been accepted and later retracted. What led to this being accepted in the first place? What later mechanism was effective in catching the mistake that didn't kick in at the time of submission?
On the other side, so what if a body of work has got a keystone fellowship? If politics plays a role in review for a journal that rejected you, could politics not have played a role in your getting that fellowship? Why then is politics good when it works in your favor and bad when it doesn't? Why say never when there's a good chance that you could improve on a paper and resubmit it elsewhere or even back at the same place?
So those are my thoughts on the reality of scientific work, review and the face-saving that is an intrinsic part of all aspect of science, indeed, life. So it's just better to keep one's options open, one's head cool and one's nose clean.
Posted by: Chris Muller | November 1, 2007 08:55 AM