The worst piece of peer review I’ve ever received

My favourite one ever is (in total) "this is a good paper but i dont think its all that interesting, the author should read work by some bloke called Driffield in this area for the state of the art in this area - Reject". Nigel Driffield

Nice piece. Lengthy but necessary to make your points.

I don't see why we are highlighting the negative here, unless the editors of THE have already decided that they oppose the current peer-review system. As with any other personalized, discipline-specific processes (e.g. the viva), it has its share of flaws, but in my experience of my own field, it is fair, functional and constructive. That is to say, I have not always agreed with the reviewers, but they have almost without exception been helpful. The only rude review I ever received was in the very first article I submitted, and it did make quite a negative impression. It was, on the other hand, a useful lesson, as it taught me how _not_ to peer-review, a caveat I have passed on to my own students and junior colleagues. Moreover, in nearly 15 years of citing from journals in my field, I've never, not _once_, come across an article that I thought had no business being published in that context (i.e. in terms of either quality or appropriateness to that journal's readership). Yes, one could argue that the system favours the lowest common denominator rather than the heights of originality, but that's the nature of scholarship more generally. It is an eye-opener to look back at reviews of works now considered seminal in the field and to see how often they received lukewarm or even negative reviews at the time of their publication. Good scholarship lasts the test of time, or perhaps at least the test of timing, by emerging at a moment when it's innovative enough to be original, but not so avant-garde that it is incomprehensible or irrelevant. In the end, we are writing for others, not for ourselves, and thus the judgement of our peers is the best possible litmus test, imperfect thought it may be.

I hope nobody is really serious about just posting everything anybody wants to "publish" and letting us dredge through it all looking for quality! Every paper I have ever published has been improved by peer review, and that's even true of the ones that got reviews I was pretty annoyed with. I've had one or two doozies, as has everyone; but it's just silly to think that means the system isn't working. I bought a mouldy orange once, but I still eat fruit! I wrote more about this issue here: http://wp.me/p5x2kS-4l.

My favorite comes from a grant application I made some years ago. First reviewer said "surely someone has done this already?" I was a bit perturbed since I thought I had done my literature search pretty well and since the reviewer did not give any reference was wondering who had done it. Then I read the second reviewer "funnily enough no one has tried this before". Had plenty of good reviews and grants since so I can laugh about it now.

We can keep the benefits of peer review, but only by fixing it to address the problems in this article. Readers may find additional inspiration here: http://www.musingsone.com/2015/03/why-be-reviewer.html and here: http://science-open-reviewed.com/webapp/

The coincidence of six. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/31/six-critics-in-search-of-an-author/

why does the authenticity of any scientific finding be held hostage by 2-3, mostly, anonymous, reviewers? a system that allows anyone (may be a pre-screened lot to weed out the bogus ones) to review within a time-frame would be the best, of course done post-publication followed by giving a score for each article. needless to say, this is going to be totally rejected by some scientists who have established their imperialism and many publishers who will fear being completely wiped out, both not a bad thing at all. in my opinion, the current system of giving away scientific credit is undemocratic,feudal and unscientific. i wrote this (http://ow.ly/Qv7Yk ) to ron vale's recent great biorxiv article (http://ow.ly/QExyw). thank you. binay panda

When science is politicized the peer review process gets worse and articles with blatant sins of omission that deceptively alter the conclusions get published even when those errors are revealed. Read http://landscapesandcycles.net/American_Meterological_Society_half-truth.html

I did once hear, from the researcher himself, of a grant review that came back with referee's comments that had, as a closing remark, "and also, the author should never have left his wife for that younger woman". The anthropologist and his younger partner are still working happily together.

The system has become quite appalling, While there are many excellent Editors, some are just pathetic or even worse biased. See my blog at http://dbkgroup.org/on-scientific-censorship-and-bitchiness/ for some examples.

My experience is that peer review is helpful if you are submitting to a highly specialist journal. But it's less good for glamour journals, and overall it's almost useless. It's been shown time and time again that anything at all, even meaningless spoofs, can easily be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Several people have argued that, without per-publication peer review we'd have a deluge of nonsense. It's too late. We already have that deluge. It is simple a commercial response to the immense pressure to publish or perish. I suspect that, quite soon, we'll settle for the sort of post-publication peer review that's been pioneered by Pubpeer. That has already proved to be far more effective at discovering mistakes and fraud than the old system.

Quite an insightful read. As always we should aim for quality! http://hairexpansion.com/

People who are not an expert in a niche field should not review papers of that field at all. A lot of reviewers make general comments about format of the manuscript etc. without contribution to the science, and therefore the review process becomes a waste of everybody's time. Some reviewers are sarcastic and downright evil.