Academia Obscura

by Glen Wright

  The integrated journal of what now?!

  Dodgy journals are simple to spot thanks to their spammy emails. The Integrated Journal of British is one such rag. The email sent to advertise the launch of the journal enthusiastically begins: ‘!! Greeting IMPACT FACTOR: 3.3275’.*† There is nothing British about the journal, which is based in India, or its content. The journal’s logo is a wolf surrounded by stars, apparently lifted from the website of a small Wisconsin home improvement company.

  Still, I don’t think The Integrated Journal of British is the worst journal of all time. I would bestow that dubious honour upon the American Based Research Journal (ABRJ). Its website declares that it is an ‘Open-Access–Monthly–Online–Double Blind Peer Reviewed Journal’. Despite its name, the website lists a UK contact address.*

  Figure 7: Strategically titled journals

  The stated scope of the journal is bewildering, with subjects covered ranging from ‘Fundamentals of Income Tax’ to ‘Fashion Trends’. They chose a stylised DNA double helix as the logo to reflect this dizzying scope. Online publication costs $150, and the journal regularly spams scholars to solicit submissions.

  Displaying blatant disregard for both the proofreading and mail merge functions, one of their spam solicitation messages starts: ‘Dear Dear Author, We are really impressed after reading your research work: “Research Article”.’ The email starts bad, gets worse, and is then signed off by the editor ‘Dr Merry Jeans’. No matter how many times I’ve read it, I still chuckle at Dr Merry Jeans. The editorial board of ABRJ features a cast of such comic characters, including ‘Dr Belly Joseph’, ‘Dr Jazzy Rolph’, and ‘Prof. William’ (no surname), none of whom really exist.

  Curious to know who was behind this operation, I did some digging. I found that ABRJ’s web address is registered to someone based in Lahore, Pakistan, who was previously a student of the Virtual University of Pakistan. His personal blog consists of just one telling post, in which he brags that he has been suspended from university for posting completed university assignments online.

  PEER REVIEW

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but it’s the withering peer review comments that do the long-term psychological damage.

  Peer review is not the prettiest of processes. Regardless of your discipline or the journal in which you publish, one of the reviewers will invariably: 1. Ask you to write a completely different paper (i.e. the paper they would have written); 2. Demand that you repeat or expand expensive and time-consuming experiments; or 3. Reject your paper out of hand, often with demoralising and petty comments.

  While peer review is supposed to provide quality control, plenty of journals are publishing utter rubbish, and there are countless occasions where journals have rejected important results (going back at least as far as the 1796 rejection by Philosophical Transactions of Edward Jenner’s report of the first vaccination against smallpox).

  Figure 8: Your manuscript on peer review

  Academics generally approach peer review as an unfortunate ordeal to be overcome on the road to publication, rather than as the scholarly meeting of minds we nostalgically tell ourselves it might once have been. Rebecca Schuman writes:18

  Think of your meanest high school mean girl at her most gleefully, underminingly vicious. Now give her a doctorate in your discipline, and a modicum of power over your future. That’s peer review.

  My personal experience has fortunately been less harrowing. For me, peer review is an underwhelming experience: tiresome and tedious at its worst; mildly helpful at its best. Yet every academic has a sob story or two, and while the vast majority of peer reviews move smoothly, it is inevitably that minute fraction of cruel comments that plagues us.

  The baptism of fire I received upon my first paper submission is one such experience. I have long since deleted the rejection email, which had weighed heavy like a horcrux on my inbox, but I recall that it was an outright rejection, followed by a list of reasons why the paper I was trying to write was ludicrously ill-conceived (followed by an even longer list of reasons why I hadn’t succeeded in any case).

  The appropriately anonymous blog Shit My Reviewers Say collects the worst of the worst, while the Journal of Environmental Microbiology periodically publishes colourful comments submitted by its reviewers.

  Some reviewers are simply hard to please:

  • ‘The whole paper reminds me of a paper of a couple of years ago, which I didn’t like.’

  • ‘Can you explain this part a bit further, but without going into detail.’

  • ‘Something is missing.’

  • ‘Didn’t like this one.’

  • ‘Is there a chance you could send me any good papers, at least once in a while?’

  The worst are downright brutal in their rejections:

  • ‘This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in the future.’

  • ‘I am afraid this manuscript may contribute not so much towards the field’s advancement as much as toward its eventual demise.’

  • ‘It is early in the year, but difficult to imagine any paper overtaking this one for lack of imagination, logic, or data – it is beyond redemption.’

  • ‘The work that this group does is a disgrace to science.’

  • ‘Presumptuous, ignorant and downright dangerous.’

  • ‘The writing is often arrestingly pedestrian.’

  • ‘Reject – More holes than my grandad’s string vest!’

  Occasionally, in their rush to criticise others, reviewers get themselves tongue-tied:

  • ‘The article could benefit from a good linguistic editing in order for it to be better sound and flowing.’

  • ‘I was not sure exactly which problem the author is trying to solve and vice versa it was not clear to me what problem the solution is intended to solve or explorer.’

  • ‘If the paper is accepted, I strongly recommend an English prof-reading.’

  Finally, some reviewers return comments so cryptic they seem designed to make the author question their own sanity:

  • ‘I would refrain from using enumerations in your paper and instead encourage you to think about the deep masculinism that comes with.’

  • ‘650 should be lowercase.’

  • ‘This needs some rephrasing – it’s loaded with the assumption that there is a real world.’

  Figure 9: My reviews

  A quick whip-round on Twitter turned up plagiarising reviewers accusing the authors of plagiarism (pot, kettle, you know the story), a reviewer that shouted ‘THIS DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSE’, and a reviewer suggesting that a paper written by a native English speaker was obviously not written by a native English speaker and should be proofread by somebody with a proper command of the English language.19

  There is an occasional side of sexism served up with a rejection (‘This paper reads like a woman’s diary, not like a scientific piece of work’).♀ Fiona Ingleby, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sussex, experienced this first-hand when a peer reviewer suggested that she enlist male co-authors to ‘serve as a possible check against . . . her own ideologically biased assumptions.’*20 The journal said it would scratch the anonymous academic from their list of potential reviewers.

  Frances Healey, Associate Director of Patient Safety at the NHS Commissioning Board Authority, received the following comment from a reviewer:

  When my son was five we discussed what type of dinosaur we should keep in the garden as a pet. Some might scare the dog, others would eat Mum’s flowers. In the end we decided not to have a dinosaur at all. Which more or less sums up this paper. You have put in a lot of effort answering a question that should never have been asked, but you do arrive at a sensible conclusion.

  Responding to such unhelpful peer-review comments is in itself an art form. Frances and her co-authors were both gracious and humorous in their response, which ends: ‘We hope our reviewer’s so
n is growing up with his dad’s sense of humour, and a real rather than imaginary pet.’

  Roy Baumeister of Florida State University composed the following template cover letter for those struggling to be so gracious:

  Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

  Enclosed is our latest version of MS# XX-XXX-XX-, that is, the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

  I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it’s fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren’t reviewing manuscripts they’d probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision.

  Some of the reviewers’ comments we couldn’t do anything about. For example, if (as reviewer C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

  One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13–28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish–American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled ‘Review of Irrelevant Literature’ that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

  We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

  Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it, but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn’t or wouldn’t have done it without your input.

  Sincerely,

  (your name here)

  Another option is to reject the rejection. Two researchers from the University of New South Wales in Sydney provide a template for such a move in the 2015 Christmas issue of the BMJ. Their letter begins:21

  Thank you for your rejection of the above manuscript. Unfortunately we are not able to accept it at this time. As you are probably aware we receive many rejections each year and are simply not able to accept them all. In fact, with increasing pressure on citation rates and fiercely competitive funding structures we typically accept fewer than 30% of the rejections we receive. Please don’t take this as a reflection of your work. The standard of some of the rejections we receive is very high.

  Einstein once rejected a rejection, withdrawing his paper and taking it elsewhere. In 1936 he submitted the paper ‘Do Gravitational Waves Exist?’,*22 written with his first American assistant, Nathan Rosen, to Physical Review. The editor, John Tate, was unsure of Einstein’s conclusions, and sent it to an expert for review. Einstein had not been accustomed to peer review, and was taken aback by the ten-page report picking apart his paper. He wrote back to Tate:23

  We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the – in any case erroneous – comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

  Sometimes, no matter how you respond, there is nothing you can do to change your fate:

  Editor comments: Please respond to Reviewer 2’s comments, who suggested Rejection of the paper.

  Reviewer 2 comments: None.

  The Dawn of Peer Review

  By RedPen BlackPen

  Editor summary: Ugck-ptha, et al. report the development of ‘fire’, a hot, dangerous, yellow effect that is caused by repeatedly knocking two stones together. They claim that the collision of the stones causes a small sky-anger that is used to seed grass and small sticks with the fire. This then grows quickly and requires larger sticks to maintain. The fire can be maintained in this state indefinitely, provided that there are fresh sticks. They state that this will revolutionise the consumption of food, defences against dangerous animals, and even provide light to our caves.

  Reviewer 1: Urgh! Fire good. Make good meat.

  Reviewer 2: Fire ouch. Pretty. Nice fire. Good fire.

  Reviewer 3: An interesting finding to be sure. However, I am highly sceptical of the novelty of this ‘discovery’ as Grok, et al. reported the finding that two stones knocked together could produce sky-anger five summers ago. (I note that this seminal work was not mentioned by Ugck-ptha, et al. in their presentation.) This seems, at best, to be a modest advancement on his previous work. Also, sky-anger occurs naturally during great storm times – why would we need to create it ourselves?

  I feel that fire would not be of significant interest to our tribe. Possibly this finding would be more suitable if presented to the smaller Krogth clan across the long river?

  Additional concerns are listed here.

  1 The results should be repeated using alternate methods of creating sky-anger besides stones. Possibly animal skulls, goat wool or sweet berries would work better?

  2 The dangers with the unregulated expansion of fire are particularly disturbing and do not seem to be considered by Ugck-ptha, et al. in the slightest. It appears that this study has had no ethical review by tribe elders.

  3 The colour of this fire is jarring. Perhaps trying something that is more soothing, such as blue or green, would improve the utility of this fire?

  4 The significance of this finding seems marginal. Though it does indeed yield blackened meat that is hot to the touch, no one eats this kind of meat.

  5 There were also numerous errors in the presentation. Ugck-ptha, et al. repeatedly referred to sky-anger as ‘fiery sky light’, the colour of the stones used was not described at all, ‘ugg-umph’ was used more than twenty times during the presentation, and ‘clovey grass’ was never clearly defined.

  THE SEMI-PROFESSIONAL RANTER

  Jon Tennant is a palaeontologist. He rants about things in pubs and thinks this is what science is.

  How the hell do you find time to do all this ranting and write a PhD about dinosaurs?

  Have you ever tried not having
a life? It works wonders for your career. Which is what I’d tell you if I had any semblance of a career. Also, it’s crocodiles, not dinosaurs.

  But I like dinosaurs. If you were a dinosaur, which would you be and why?

  Fukuiraptor. Obvious reasons.

  Do you have a mortifying peer review nightmare story?

  One time I got Adam Sandler as a referee. He just told me to watch all his movies, made a joke about my mum, and then rejected my paper as it didn’t reference Big Daddy.

  Describe the traditional model of academic publishing in 140 characters.

  Shit. That’s less than 140 characters, isn’t it? Still space? Something something corporate greed.

  What is the future of academic publishing?

  One that acknowledges that the internet is a thing.

  And peer review?

  Democratic. Without reviewer 2.

  What is your preferred post-coital cheese?

  Now now, briehave.

  Favourite Twitter hashtag?

  #ElsevierValentines

  Any bad advice for young academics?

  Do everything senior people tell you to do. Being at university is all about conforming to the status quo.

  You wrote a cool book – wanna plug it?

  It’s called Excavate Dinosaurs. It has DIY dinosaurs that you pop out and build. I’m happy to plug it because it’s awesome, and I don’t get royalties, because publishers.