I really loathe reviewing for GlamMagz for two main reasons. For one, it’s hard to remain neutral: publication of a paper in my field in such a journal is beneficial both for the field and for the young people who are authors on this paper. Second, the demands of some of my colleagues so often make my blood boil. At that point I’m very happy these reviews are anonymous and I really don’t want to know the names of these colleagues. Here are some of the things the reviewers wrote in this most recent round:
“the authors have not convinced me of the conceptual novelty of their findings to warrant publication in a very top-tier journal”
“appears standard for a top-tier journal”
“However, currently, this manuscript is more suited for a specialized journal”
This seems to suggest to me that these colleagues apply different standards for different journals. So when the journal sent each reviewer the reviews of the other reviewers and asked for comments, one of my comments was the following:
The intuitive notion of journal rank is a figment of our imagination, devoid of any empirical support. So-called “top-tier journals” exist in the same reality in which homeopathy cures, dowsing rods find water and astrologers correctly predict the future. Asking for additional ‘interesting’ or ‘curious to know’ experiments merely because of the venue the authors chose borders on the unethical, IMHO, as there are millions of ‘curious to know’ experiments to be potentially carried out. Reviewers ought to try and avoid multiple standards in their reviews and restrain additional experiments to the minimum required by the statements of the authors. Professional editors are being paid precisely because they can predict whether their readers will find the statements of the authors ‘interesting’ or ‘curious to know’.
(Where ‘curious to know’ was a phrase one of the reviewers used whenever they wanted some tangentially related experiment to be done)
I doubt the editors at GlamMagz are very interested in these sorts of comments. If they are, I now have a boilerplate from which to draw future comments.
Comments are closed.