Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Reviewer ?
Peer review is something I've talked about before from time to time, but apparently I'm not making myself clear. I don't know why, I use plain simple language, and it's not very hard to understand. But for the sake of having a go-to post, let me try and put things as briefly and as clearly as possible.
Monday, 2 May 2016
Reviewing peer review
Brief review of peer review, what it is, isn't, is supposed to be, etc. That kind of thing. And that does involve being an overly anal-friendly monkey from time to time.
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I think that the problem a lot of nonscientists have with peer review and academia at large is that a comes off sounding like an exclusive circle jerk club. Think about it, to the average layperson a "peer" is a close friend so there translate "peer review" to "friend review" and think it's all bullshit.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor Very nice and interesting piece. One question I have is: are reviewers financially compensated in any shape or form? and if yes by whom, do they work for the journals, are they contractors, I am just curious.. Or does it vary from case to case or journal to journal?
ReplyDeleteCiro Villa In principle it's the policy of the journal. In practise, at least for astronomy I don't know of any journals that do this. The only compensation offered is free access to the journal for a month or so, which is usually useless since most reviewers will be at an institute which has access anyway.
ReplyDeleteWhile reviewing, it's accepted that the reviewer will be paid by their usual institute (in other words they give up time they could spend on their own projects), even though the review is produced for the journal. I guess that's rather bizarre now that I stop to think about it.
Rhys Taylor I guess I was trying to figure out any tangible or less tangible incentive for the reviewers themselves, i.e. do they do it for money, recognition, fame, glory, or just because they love doing it?..after all I would venture to guess that reviewing (some) papers can be a pretty tedious and time consuming exercise..
ReplyDeleteCiro Villa Tangible incentives are basically nil since reviewers are anonymous. This has the advantage that even an unknown postdoc can feel free to be as harsh as they like toward a distinguished professor without fear of reprisal or hurting their career chances - there's no incentive to toe the line. So it's not for money, recognition, fame or glory (everyone's reviewing papers anyway, so there's no glory to be had), and for most people it certainly isn't because they love doing it. Done properly, it can take weeks to review a longer paper (so journals will seldom ask anyone to review more than two papers per year at most). If it's not done properly, the editor can even reject the review (this is rare, but I know of one case where the editor declared the review to be not useful so they sent it to another referee !).
ReplyDelete"A sense of duty" probably suggests something far more grandiose than it really is. "Necessary evil" is probably better. Everyone expects to have to review a paper at some point, including the employers. It might not be much fun to do (although some people really enjoy it) but it would be far worse if no-one did it at all.