I’m remiss in getting this up until now, as Leif sent it back on May 12th. Prep, travel and recovery for ICCC4 took up quite a bit of my time, but I’m pleased to be able to offer this from Dr. Svalgaard now.
Cartoon from community.acs.org
Dr. Svalgaard writes:
Back in October WUWT had an article about my paper ‘Heliomagnetic Magnetic Field 1835-2009‘.
The paper has now gone through extensive peer review. I promised to let people in on the review process and can now do that. They contain a mixture of arcane technical points and general whining. The review history may be of general interest, at least as far the ‘flavor’ and tone of the reviews are concerned.
The entire review is condensed into a PDF file, which can be viewed below:
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I wonder if a young Swiss patent office assistant examiner could get published today. I wonder, too, if the web doesn’t offer a better way to do all this. I guess time will tell. For some strange reason the print media world seems very dated and much too slow.
Thank you for your always invaluable insights. Well done Dr. Svalgaard! Well done indeed!
PS: For all his faults, Reviewer No.2 gave us all a better education than Reviewer No.1.
One commenter wrote: “The customary way to flog a bad paper is to pawn it off on a worse journal.” At the risk of offending the writer, the actual expression has nothing to do with pawn shops, but is “to palm off”. It comes from cheating at card games, like poker. I see this expression misused all the time, so am not naming the writer.
Note to OT police: it’s the weekend and we should have some extra freedom…..
IanM
Suranda says:
May 29, 2010 at 4:50 pm
You too eh?
How can a supposedly solid iron core through an iron shell create an electro-magnetic field when iron has no energy of it’s own. Where did this evidence of iron come from when you cannot sample the core. (Iron going through iron to show a new molecularly dense iron molecule when it is suppose to be pulled down by gravity)
No sense at all. This iron took time to go to the center to make the core would mean we had no magnetic field…hense no gravity only centrifugal force.
Dr. Svalgaard thanks for this peek into the peer review process.
Leif”s “no comment” comment is pregnant with meaning.
Wow! reviewer #2 reads just a little bit more into the title than the average reader would.
I think I get the picture now. Is someone just a little pissed off at having been forced to reveal their own data, perhaps?
And a little bit of sniping goes a long way (towards proving a lack of professionalism).
I found that review history very interesting, thanks for posting it here Leif.
And congrats on having your paper published.
OT
A question for a moderator testing WordPress blockquote.
…and I’ll get my answer in a moment.
[Usually. No one knows for sure how WordPress operates? ~dbs]
rbateman @ur momisugly May 29, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Would you mind elaborating? What am I looking for in the images you posted?
Cheers!
F. Ross: May 29, 2010 at 7:10 pm
.
As they say, ‘go figure’.
/dr.bill
While working on my master’s degree I would assist one of the professors in reviewing papers. He had MS and would needed help in both the physical effort and data analysis. I had never seen such vitriol in a review. While I my field is Electrical and Computer Engineering, and different in nature from this study, it was still about how do you measure, what did you measure, the method of analysis, and conclusion. If these steps were followed and showed to be both viable and effective, the review was to improve the paper and not to argue the points. Certainly it wasn’t about personal biases, or personal attacks.
Lief has far more patience than I. Although you could tell that towards the end he was showing his frustration. Had this continued, reviewer #2 would still be asking for dental records, height and weight charts of Leif’s children, and the record of exact second that Leif was brought into this world as well as location and orientation of the birth canal.
Keep up the good work Leif.
So far I’ve never taken an interest in publishing. Twice there was a need (income related) to publish. My experience:
Case 1: ENDLESS ridiculous squabbling from an editor about a 4 PAGE publication.
Case 2: 100+ page article with tons of figures & references accepted without the requirement to change so much as a word or image. Clean shot.
The irony:
Case 2 involved highly controversial material, whereas Case 1 was in no way controversial.
The political intrigue behind the apparent irony:
In case 1 it became clear that I was involved in a “package deal” negotiation. I kept my mouth shut about “something” (else). A nice cheque was then cut and suddenly all editorial issues “mysteriously” disappeared and the original manuscript was published without a word changed (despite all the original fuss).
In hindsight, case 1 was a valuable (sociological) learning experience. (Obviously my mouth remained shut through case 2!)
Politics is good fun.
In my pre-retirement days as a biologist (with an attendant interest in environmental matters), I often had occasion to wonder at the arcane twists of peer review. One reviewer would criticise the MS in one way and another would criticise it in exactly the opposite way. Keeping the editor happy under such circumstances could be almost as hard as the actual science. It was not uncommon for referees to praise the part of the paper you were privately a bit worried about, and to criticise the part which one had fondly thought was the most clear-cut thing in the MS. Reviewers would criticise me for saying what I had clearly rejected and for not saying what I had defended at length. So I am a little underwhelmed when peer review is trotted out as if it were decisive in greenhouse controversies. Still, as Churchill said of democracy, it is the worst possible system except for anything else you can think of. Likewise with peer review – it’s the best anyone has come up with. And blogs? Ultimately one must accept that peer reviewed publication would be preferable. Yet a significant blog contribution may be intensely scrutinised by numerous readers. That should count for something. Perhaps such a contribution should be viewed in the way that theologians view some candidates for the biblical canon – the deuterocanonical books: denied full status but not denied all status.
F. Ross says:
May 29, 2010 at 6:46 pm
“The present title is untruthful and megalomanic, leaving out any doubt on the correctness of the estimated HMF.” [reviewer #2]
Wow! reviewer #2 reads just a little bit more into the title than the average reader would.
—
That just tends to highligh their use of a ‘private’ language. If you read enough of their papers or reviews from their perspective you will quickly catch onto the hidden meanings whenever such words are brouhgt into play. It’s a joke, not on any normal person, but on themselves! They don’t think us normal humans have the capability to decipher them, you know, reading the hidden meaning. (They are wrong, again!) The dictionary on their language is rather protected currently, enough said, wouldn’t want to alter a specimen while measurements are in progress. 😉
Leif, congrats on your paper.
So has it left you with a longing for “better peers” ?
If anyone is further interested in the peer review process check out the E-Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology at http://www.ejssm.org/ojs/index.php/ejssm/index. This is one of my areas of research. This journal does the reviews on-line for all to see. Go to the Archives section and check through some of the submissions and their reviews. Most reviewer are quite frank but the end result is a usually a better product (in our field at least).
—
I regret to report that my limited personal experience as both a peer review officer and somebody defending a manuscript submitted to peer review has been bereft of funny stories or enraging indignities. The people with whom I’ve engaged as reviewers were smart, knowledgeable individuals who were genuinely interested in seeing that the work hit print to best possible effect, and the results of addressing their comments (and suggestions) was always a better finished product than it would otherwise have been.
Even collaborative authorship is an uncertain job. Outside the cadre of genuine scriveners named as authors on any paper – and in my experience there are seldom more than a couple or three who crank out the bulk of any manuscript – there’s concern about whether or not focus has been too shortsighted, that things have been missed, and that the “name” guys responsible for getting the funding and nominally in supervision of your study might not simply be playing Pointy-Haired Boss and adding zero real value to the work you’re trying to pull into publishable form.
If you’re lucky (and I think I’ve had a helluva lot of luck), the people assigned to review your stuff will climb into your manuscript with the same intention you have when you’re given somebody else’s pages to comb through, and the objective will always be the publication of something worth putting into the literature for colleagues to rely upon.
All kidding, kvetching, and efforts at snarking aside, isn’t that what academic publishing is really for?
Or is the perspective of clinical medicine people that radically different from the attitudes prevailing in the pure sciences?
—
Very instructive post. Thank you.
Or your grammar.
Rich Matarese says:
What you are describing is what the peer review system should be in all disciplines. Sure there will be disagreements and some vehemence but mainly the end result should be a clearer presentation and a good check on obvious errors.
This process has failed in the climate related publications, self evidently, otherwise there would not be all that published stuff about polar bears that defies simple logic and general encyclopedic knowledge.
Climategate has also shown that in a narrow field, the peer review process can be high jacked by a clique and used to their own advantage, both in grants and in glory.
Before the Moloch of grant money gets to the general peer review process in all disciplines a new format of reviewing should be vigorously pursued. The internet offers the means.
I think also that anonymity of reviewers should be fine before the publication of the paper, but should be revealed on request after , so a clique cannot form.
Quite usual. The guy has no own team (=mafia). He is doomed.
The are three options.
1. He joins the right team and starts to support AGW.
2. He builds up his own team (impossible for a non-professor)
3. He considers science as a hobby and earns his money in a different way (running a pizzeria?). He can always publish his manuscripts in arxiv.org.
—
anna v writes of how:
“Climategate has also shown that in a narrow field, the peer review process can be highjacked by a clique and used to their own advantage, both in grants and in glory.”
Truth. By 19 November 2009 I recall having had my blood thoroughly up over the CRU correspondents’ flagrant and purposeful perversion of peer review. Sure, there was the political pillage of “cap-and-trade” to enrage me, but I most fervently wanted warm viscera spilled across the linoleum as the proper treatment for Prof. Jones and his coterie because of what they’d done to peer review.
In medicine, such a concerted effort to turn the editorial process in a whole discipline’s professional publications to a suggestio falsi, suppressio veri objective is clearly understood to be an indirect but definite threat to patients’ lives and health. The fact that it is repeatedly attempted (and has, to limited extents, been accomplished from time to time) tends to make us not-quite-scientists in the sawbones racket extremely sensitive about it.
We know how it’s done. We get it done to us all the time. We even understand how such violations of professional standards of ethical conduct can have dire repercussions in terms of the allocation of resources to further inquiries. Good people waste their time and their effort exploring avenues of research signposted by bogus publications, and effective work that might otherwise have been undertaken gets deferred.
And this means that patients who otherwise might have had the benefit of that effective work must suffer, and in many cases they die. Nothing gets the attention more sharply than that, believe me.
At the close of her comment, anna v had suggested:
“…that anonymity of reviewers should be fine before the publication of the paper, but should be revealed on request after , so a clique cannot form.”
I would go further. Upon publication, the officers responsible for peer review should be afforded open editorial credit for their work on the article. If their comments were received and addressed by the authors of the manuscript, they had constructive input, and the value of that input must be acknowledged.
In more than one instance, I have seen the comments of peer reviewers contribute substantively to the quality of the work being submitted for publication. For example, I’ve whacked in whole sections of expatiation at such urgings, and I immediately understood that such expansions did much to help put the central information of the study into better context than I had shortsightedly assumed would be adequate. The reviewers who have offered such suggestions warranted, in my opinion, credit as participating authors. It’s something my co-authors should certainly have done, damnit.
Forget the “on request after.” Acknowledge the reviewers’ contributions. They sure as hell don’t get any other compensation for the hard and valuable work they do.
—
Content goes way above my head (my field is economics) but thank you Mr. Svalgaard for your willingness and effort to provide transparency on the review process within your field. Was an interesting read.
Aside from manners I agree with the general points of reviewer 2 on data availability which in essence you do as well. That part is actually very interesting and with your publication of the review process you do your small part in possibly spreading this point of view.
Congrats on the publishing.
I applaud Leif for letting us see the ‘inside’ of his experience.
@Rich Matarese
Excellent suggestion about acknowleging reviewers and their input, although perhaps with some reservations. Undoubtedly some reviewers do contribute as much if not more than some co-authors, but how to decide that and if it deserves elevation to co-author status? How to measure it? Also who would decide it? Some authors would be happy, some very unhappy about it. I can imagine two very positive scenarios: eminent professor reviews unknown group’s paper and addition of Prof as author elevates status of unknown group; unknown newbie reviews and makes good contributions to eminent group’s paper and addition as author is very good on their CV. OTOH lots of potential for disgruntlement on both sides.
Naming the reviewers routinely after publication (at least) and making the reviews available would be positive. On the other hand journals find it hard to get reviewers and this might reduce the pool (for example those who fear being seen to do a poor job – due to lack of time, a common excuse). As a post-doc in a prominent lab many years ago I became only too familiar with the backbiting and the cliques. I’ve been out of peer review as an author for at least 15 years but as a reviewer I am increasingly in demand due to broad and crossover expertise. The cliques are still there and I’ve been a third reviewer on several occasions; not all reviewers are serving the science – many seem to think they have to be negative and critical because they can and yes a lot of time is wasted on trivial points that should not matter.
MaxL says:
May 29, 2010 at 9:41 pm
If anyone is further interested in the peer review process check out the E-Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology at http://www.ejssm.org/ojs/index.php/ejssm/index. This is one of my areas of research. This journal does the reviews on-line for all to see. Go to the Archives section and check through some of the submissions and their reviews. Most reviewer are quite frank but the end result is a usually a better product (in our field at least).
_____________________________________________________________________
I think the key to your journal is “This journal does the reviews on-line for all to see.” I would hope this keeps the idiotic and nasty comments to a minimum, if for no other reason that it reflects poorly on the journal and therefore the journal will not use that reviewer again.
Rich Matarese etc.
The problem is to do with junk science. leif has his proponents of the iron sun to deal with (and many others). Should junk science be published in respectiable journals? They must have standards to keep. Perhaps they need a special junk science issue?
Should a article suggesting that homeopath can cure amputation be published in a professional journal?
http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/homeopathy.htm
I think not! If the science is so outrageous that no respectable scientist believes it it is necessary to consign it to lesser journals. BUT the author after many rejections may think he is being picked on.
Surly the scientists at the top of their field should have a greater say than those on the fringes?
\harry