Slashdot Mirror
What Happens When Nobody Proofreads an Academic Paper
An anonymous reader writes: Drafts are drafts for a reason. Not only do they tend to contain unpolished writing and unfinished thoughts, they're often filled with little notes we leave ourselves to fill in later. Slate reports on a paper recently published in the journal Ethology that contained an unfortunate self-note that made it into the final, published article, despite layers upon layers of editing, peer review, and proofreading. In the middle of a sentence about shoaling preferences, the note asks, "should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?" When notified of the mistake, the publisher quickly took it down and said they would "investigate" how the line wasn't caught. One of the authors said it wasn't intentional and apologized for the impolite error.
I'm going to make a guess here. No academic would leave that line right in the middle of their paper, and there is no way that the fire-breathing peer reviewers would let it slip. It was probably a comment left in one version of the document that was incorrectly transferred into the text of the final copy. When you have a million versions of closed-source MS Office files floating around, this shit happens. Another reason to use open formats.
If anyone cares to read the passage with the insert here's a twitter pic of it in use.
TLDR, that's what happens.
I think the point is that standards and professionalism are slipping, even in science.
I think the point is that standards and professionalism are slipping, even in science.
No, the point is that standards and professionalism are low. To show that they are "slipping" would require showing that they were higher at some point in the past. Crappy, poorly edited papers are nothing new.
There are two types of reviewers: The valuable ones that actually read a paper and try to understand it, and the worthless ones that look at title, abstract and who wrote it (usually easy to find out even in anonymous review). The first type catches these things, the second does not and quite often lest bad papers in and keeps good papers out. The second type is much more common.
Or to put it short: Peer review is broken, as there is no quality control in most cases.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
and the articles they reference are wildly inaccurate. From TFA:
[Emphasis Added]
So the paper was proofread, peer-reviewed and copyedited. Sigh.
People make mistakes. Life is like that sometimes. The authors of the paper will face consequences for this. Hopefully, they'll learn from them.
Nothing to see here, unless you wrote the paper or are the person referenced.. The post and the linked TFA are a waste of time.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
This could have been avoided if the authors had used LaTeX for writing their paper. It allows for comments in the text that don't become part of the formatted output.
% Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?
There are also various LaTeX packages for writing comments, adding annotations and tracking changes that could be useful when peer-reviewing a paper.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Happens all the time. We had a report that had one project member with a title of SRP Lap Dog. It was put there in jest about 6 months earlier, along with some swear words that actually did get caught int the final edits, but not the title. Professionals are human too, and stuff happens.
There are major problems in the world (e.g. poverty, disease, and conflict). Our best hope for reducing these problems is factual observation and logical reasoning - i.e. science.
So, what are the relevant standards for science? Fundamentally, the relevant standards are about whether we are increasing our scientific knowledge - particularly scientific knowledge that is useful for reducing the world's major problems.
And what is professionalism? Basically it's about focusing on getting the job done and not getting diverted into irrelevant conflict. But sometimes disagreement, and even conflict, is relevant to getting the job done.
Here on Slashdot there seems to be much more interest in the personal drama associated with this paper than in the paper's scientific content - or how it might contribute to reducing the world's major problems. It's a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.
But ultimately doing good science isn't about trying to stay on the straight and narrow of standards and professionalism. Doing good science is about wanting to do good science to the very core of who you are. It's about desperately wanting to add some relatively little increment to the vast body of science - hopefully even something that contributes to reducing the world's major problems.
And I'm not really seeing how describing a colleagues paper as "crappy" really indicates one way or the other whether the authors were serious about doing good science. Some people use crude language and some people don't. But there isn't some simple rule that people who use crude language are all sinners while those who don't are all perfect saints.
The more you specialise, the less you are understood. It is not without reason nature is biased against species who can only survive in specific environments.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Obviously Gabor did not review the manuscript.
No. When you use word processing instead of document markup this shit happens. Writing yourself notes that will show up in the final version should never be a standard practice for Knuth's sake.
On a slight tangent, I've been wondering about this "things are getting worse" meme as it relates to just about anything related to humanity that can be tracked over time. You read so much today about worldwide atrocities, NSA snooping, domestic crime, political skullduggery, and one starts to develop the impression that things truly are getting worse. I think it would be interesting to see if that's actually the case or whether it's a mirage perpetuated by the changing nature of how we're interconnected via the Internet, or perhaps because world events went through a sort of unusually calm period in the 80s and 90s, or perhaps it's as simple as the notion that we were mostly sheltered by our parents as children to some extent and didn't truly open our eyes to the reality of the world until we got older...
Shit happens.
At least they weren't dissing Dennis Gabor.
For my embarassing notes I use the fixmetodonotes package that puts all my notes in bright yellow boxes with huge red FIXMEs warnings on the border. Hard to miss.
Technology is here to prevent us from embarassing ourselves.
But do people really expect Slashdot articles to be proofread? For that we'd need to employ editors to replace the scripts currently posting stories.
Just kidding, but people will make a big deal out of this because they can twist it to whatever "everything is falling apart" worldview they hold. The statement got added post peer review accidentally and people that had read the paper a million times missed it. As they use to say at the height of the Roman empire, "Pol fit."
Frankly, I bet that crappy Gabor paper gets a lot more interest now than it would have garnered with an appropriate reference.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
This is exactly why reports on global warming cannot be trusted.
Of course this happens. The world is going to direction where people are rushed through some watered-down education (where they get no chance to fail a couple of times first or think things through). They learn to solve problems quickly with some high-level tools. The attention to detail and mastering things down to core essentials is slipping. The guy with the coolest TED talk wins. Others are boring nerds wasting their time with abstract concepts. And hey, quality assurance, what's that? We need to ship this thing quickly.
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."
Widely attributed to Socrates, ~450BC.
Middle aged and elderly doomsayers love to bitch about how their generation were upstanding citizens but today's kids are nothing but morally bankrupt punks who are letting civilization go to shit.
Civilization was never as good as our rose-tinted glasses from the time when we were young, beautiful, horny, and ignorant of what an awful place the world really is make it look. In other words, "/b/ was never good."
According to the article, the comment was added in revisions after peer review. It should have been caught before publication, but it's not the reviewers' fault.
One other thing: to catch this reliably, you need to have someone read through it who knows that it's the final version. Otherwise they may well assume that it's still an active question, waiting for views. And of course, you should always word your notes more politely!
/b/ was never good
Wait, it was supposed to be good? /b/ is the unashamed cesspool. It's gotta be somewhere. I don't think anyone ever claimed /b/ was good.
I'd like to share my favourite publishing editing error, as it's related.
In an issue of Amiga Format computer magazine (July 1992), the Paint Pot 2 coverdisk instructions page in the magazine went to print containing a heading saying "Type some shit in here please".
Middle aged and elderly doomsayers love to bitch about how their generation were upstanding citizens but today's kids are nothing but morally bankrupt punks who are letting civilization go to shit.
Not true. Nearly all people from my generation (35-40) I know complain how well-behaved and submissive today's youngsters are.
People regularly claim that /b/ used to be good and that it's being ruined by summer and forced memes and recently SJW.
Is the Gabor paper crappy?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The infamous Signetics datasheet that slipped under the radar.
This is not down to the reviewers (although it is somewhat surprising that none of them caught it).
In defence of peer review it's completely unpaid labour which can be extremely time-consuming and
essentially has to be done at great haste in your spare time. The biggest incentive I've ever had for reviewing a paper is
20% off my next submission to the OA journal in question. Which made zero difference to me since all OA
charges were paid by my institution anyway.
While I've always tried to be as careful and helpful as possible there are frequently dozens of pages
of dense and highly technical text to read (often in extremely poor English) and since your job is to
critique the quality of the science not the quality of the writing or presentation it's important that you don't
get bogged down in details. People vary in the extent to which they report this kind of thing - personally I
always do if I see it but I can't guarantee I'll spot everything, particularly if I happen to have an unexpectedly
high workload when the review deadline hits.
IMO the burden is now far too squarely on the author to fix this sort of thing. Probably 90% of the papers I've published
have had no editorial intervention at all (I once annoyed a publisher by massively changing the galley proofs
of an article because I had expected some kind of editing and had not had time to go through and proofread
before the hard deadline hit) and frankly I'm amazed I've never made a howler like this.
There are major problems in the world (e.g. poverty, disease, and conflict). Our best hope for reducing these problems is factual observation and logical reasoning - i.e. science.
No, science is just a tool that can be used to predict the outcome of any changes that we make to the world. Science is amoral and has been been used to create the issues you describe as much as it has alleviated them.
Science does not say that poverty, disease or conflict are "problems" so it cannot give "hope" that they can be reduced.
There are a few objective measures that can be made. We know that professional employment was once considered to be life-long. We know that employers used to offer on the job training and actual entry level employment. We know that at one time retail employers believed 6 days a week and observance of national holidays was just fine. We know that single income families was once the norm.
That's not to say things were perfect. The red scare and blacklists were real. We don't really know if the various spy agencies were more scrupulous at the time or if they just didn't have enough technology and manpower to behave as badly as they do today.
I do know that for whatever reason (simple ability increasing or moral decay) every year the U.S. does more and more of those things that my 4th grade teacher said the 'Russians' (meaning the USSR) were bad for doing. It's not just childhood sheltering. I know for a fact that at one time you really could just walk through the airport with suitcase and ticket in hand and get on a plane with no form of ID whatsoever. Your suitcase would be run through an x-ray and you would pass through the worlds least sensitive metal detector. If you had a video camera that looked like an Uzi on an X-ray, you and the security guy could have a good laugh about it (once he looked in the bag, naturally).
Mysterious objects found in public created funny urban legends (if they were even noticed), not civil panic.
On a slight tangent, I've been wondering about this "things are getting worse" meme as it relates to just about anything related to humanity that can be tracked over time.
This is a natural consequence of random changes to personal and social preferences over time. You grow up with the particular set of preferences that is accepted by the majority and they become your norm. Over time the preferences in society change and the majority opinion changes so you naturally move from being in the majority to the minority. What was once the accepted majority view becomes a minority view and your opinons become out of step with the rest of society. The older you get, the more this happens and the more you feel out of touch with the "modern" world.
The real problem comes when we consider the majority opinion to be morally superior to the minority opinion. Since these opinions change randomly over time it becomes inevitable that views and attitudes that we form when young become less morally acceptable when we get old, and the attitude of those around us becomes less morally acceptable to us. So we are left with the choice of conforming to the current morality or sticking with the morality that was prevalent when we first formed our moral framework.
The alternative is to follow an absolute moral framework that does not change over time. In this case you will always be out of step with the rest of the world, but at least it won't get worse as you get older!
Clearly, they should have claimed this was merely an attempt at something new, a device to engage the reader. What do you think reader? Should we have cited the crappy Gabor paper here? Its a discussion point; not an error!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I would have even said that; the thing that happens when no one proof reads a paper is; The press or some other organization get hold of it and declare it SCIENCE or quote it as a "study". Especially before any reasonable revue.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The paper seems to be about contact between fishes of poeciliid fish. They are commonly called "guppies".
Now...there happens to be another genus of fishes in the same family which are called crappies (Pomoxis sp.).
Coincidence?
Not true. Nearly all people from my generation (35-40) I know complain how well-behaved and submissive today's youngsters are.
Yes this is exactly why my generation thinks. That today's youngsters are far less wild than we were.
zero tolerance does that.
95% of all academic papers are tosh.
it's a just capitalization mistake. Crappy Gabor is one of the leading researchers in ethology. He's up there with Shitty Farnosi and Lackluster Michaels.
Whatever bad things have happened at least the existential threats facing us now are long term ones.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
According to most commenters on Internet forums, grammar and spelling are unimportant and for the most part should be ignored. And anyone who complains about such errors, intentional or otherwise, should be hung by the testicles until shriveled.
Public school education is the problem. Teachers are unfamiliar with the subjects they're trying to teach (such as reading, writing, English).
When a person is corrected by the "language cops" he is embarrassed and his only response is name-calling.
Fata viam invenient.
Yep. The feminists are winning. With men 17% of teachers in elementary schools and 25% of all teachers through 12th grade, the feminist agenda of "keep quiet", "sit still", no recess, and studying for the test are pacifying the boys.
Grandpa Simpson put it best: "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It is interesting that fears of nuclear war have disappeared almost entirely. The arsenals are still in place, almost as powerful as they were at peak. More countries have significant amounts of nuclear weapons and there are doubts about the maintenance procedures in at least some of the countries.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
SJWs are by no means killing /b/. If anything, they give the men-children there something to rant about.
There are a few objective measures that can be made. We know that professional employment was once considered to be life-long.
Not true. Average job tenure is higher today than in the past. "Lifetime jobs" are a myth that never happened for most people.
We know that employers used to offer on the job training and actual entry level employment.
Citation please. Can you provide any evidence that job training was more prevalent in the past?
The arsenals are still in place, almost as powerful as they were at peak.
No. Nuclear arsenals have dramatically declined, in both number and average warhead yield. In the 1960s, America had more than 30,000 warheads. Today we have less than 5,000. The Russian arsenal has declined even more. Here is a nice graph.
when i google "deadly conflict 1980s" this is the first thing that pops up.
http://www.economist.com/conte...
apparently the 1980s sucked. But you didn't hear about it, because the US "-doesn't care about black people."
We are living in the least deadly period in recorded history, violence by all metrics is dropping per capita.
I don't see nothing terribly out of place in regards to worldwide atrocities... if you're talking about gaza. Keep in mind that the death of 2000 palestinians fell in the middle of a 2 year period involving the deaths of 200,000 syrians.
24 hour news networks need to fill air time, so they pretty much cover anything and everthing like it was 9/11. And the US has never been terribly interested when americans aren't dying. And we didn't really fight anyone in the 80s and 90s.
Solipsism and media bias, bias in recall, and parental protection probably all factor into common misperception.
In a previous life, I had put a humorous phrase -- a reference to ``Real Programming'' -- in a technical report that was support to be submitted to a government agency that we were working for under contract. None of the others who reviewed the report noticed it -- maybe they were too busy that day and didn't pay as much attention as they normally did. They'd typically spot any questionable grammar that I might have used and I was sure someone would catch it and send it back to me to change. Nobody did, though, and I was lucky enough to get it back and delete the phrase before the report went went out the door. Learned a valuable lessen about trusting proofreaders that day: Don't.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
because nobody's finger is on the proverbial trigger anymore.
the cold war was scary because russians are fucking crazy...
holy shit, fucking Putin is 50 kinds of batshit insane all by himself. You ever see any of those damn dashboard cams? you know why they even have dashboard cams? holy fuck.
In manufacturing there is a tendency to add extra inspectors after each slip up (well in defense related manufacturing anyway, from what I saw). Eventually every inspector comes to believe that what they are supposed to inspect ihas either already been inspected numerous times, or would get inspected by someone else later. Soon there are so many inspections that nobody actually does a real inspection, as they all believe their inspection is redundant. With multiple levels of proof reading I imagine a similar failure mode is going on here. Just one inspector should be tasked with QA signoff, not a crowd of them.
the NYT, MSNBC, and the Daily Show.
or perhaps because world events went through a sort of unusually calm period in the 80s and 90s
sure as shit ain't that...
or perhaps it's as simple as the notion that we were mostly sheltered by our parents as children to some extent and didn't truly open our eyes to the reality of the world until we got older.
and that's where I'd put my money.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
That, or all the estrogen mimicking compounds in our plastics! YAY BPA (and friends)
The paper is full of disproving strawmen, dynamite charts and other things unrelated to science. Who are they to call someone else's work crappy?
xxxx Note to self: in future prefix notes to self with an easy to find string such as 'xxx'.
Your new meme is actually as old as time. And the 80s and 90s were not the "unusually calm" periods you think they were. Obviously you did not live through them and/or are ignorant of history. Not that things are great now and couldn't be better and weren't better years ago.
You do know the link you gave goes back to only 1983, don't you? And that it reflects only a difference of 1 year? Look back to the '50s and '60s (that I spoke of the red scare should give you some hint of the timeframe).
Read some recent history. Ask your dad.
It's not a paradox.
It's just that most people are lazy, incompetent, ignorant, stupid, or some combination of those.
People who actually do their jobs in things like inspection, code review, compliance, etc. get blacklisted and forced out of the workplace because the stupid, lazy, ignorant and incompetent are useful idiots to the .0001% oligarchs who are sucking up all the value in society.
Yes - it's a story of the life of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Not sure how it applies to the paper in question here.
This story is exactly why I've encapsulated my self-notes and comments in c-code-style markings: /*this is a note to myself */
It's trivial to skim a document for the existence of such markups. Yeah, it takes a little-self-discipline while writing, but it sure pays off.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Read some recent history. Ask your dad.
No. I ran out on his mother for a reason.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I hope they didn't hurt Zsa Zsa's feelings.
Final resolution: The paper has been updated online to remove this comment and in the end Gabor's crappy paper was not cited.
Wait, slashdot is posting a story about lack of "editing, peer review, and proofreading"? That, good sirs, is irony.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Because as we all know, feminists love nothing more than having women being dominant in the workforce only in traditionally-female, low-wage jobs like non-management positions in lower education.
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
Look back to the '50s and '60s
Job tenure in the 1950s and 1960s was EVEN LOWER. Look, when you post unsubstantiated nonsense, and someone provides a citation that shows you are wrong, the proper response is not to post more unsubstantiated nonsense, but to provide your own citation, if you can find one.
The whole "job for life" myth has no basis in reality. It never happened. People think it did because "The Dick van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy" showed people in the same job for years. Those shows were fiction. Sure, some people had long term employment, but even more people have it today. Job tenure has not gone down. It has gone up.
Read some recent history. Ask your dad.
My dad is neither an economist nor a statistician, so I don't see how his input is meaningful.
Did your dad hold a job in any of the relevant decades?
Since your citation didn't cover the time period in question, it has no substantial meaning in the context.
Remind me again what china gave up here? no more increases of emissions by 2030?... yippy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
See http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp01ft848q61h/1/518.pdf for an analysis of job stability in the mid-1900's - women's job tenure rose slightly, while men's dropped significantly. At the same time, we went from single income families to dual income families.
Not to mention people writing shit to impress themselves.
Sounds like a character from the newspaper comic strip, "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is important "news for nerds" because of the fact that this "peer reviewed" article had a such an egregious error in it that should have been easily spotted if, in fact, the paper was ever actually reviewed.
What does this imply for OSS that is "peer reviewed by millions" as we are wont to point out?
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
True. I was definitely wrong about that.
Still, I think the number of weapons ready for use is cause for concern.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Put "YYYY" by every comment you want to edit out later. Then do a simple search in the document for that quad Y or whatever character. Been doing this since college and hasn't failed me yet.
Dad got a Post Office job shortly after WWII, and kept it until he retired. There actually were quite a few people I knew who had what were essentially lifetime jobs. I know fewer people with lifetime jobs nowadays, but still some.
These are observations from a very restricted viewpoint. I'm not going to try to extrapolate them. It may well be that there were more lifetime jobs at the time, and everybody else had much less job stability.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Good grief I wish for the return of the sanity of those days!
Nobody back then worried about being nuked by the Chinese, only the Soviets. In the 50s and 60s, we didn't have reliable second-strike capability, since so much of the deterrent was bombers that could theoretically be caught on the ground. There was also the question of how many losses the Soviets were willing to take to knock out the US, particularly after WWII.
Once we got reliable second-strike capabilities (long-range SLBMs, for example), the threat seemed to be a lot weaker. I also no longer went to schools that did nuclear war drills.
There has also never been tensions like the Cuban Missile Crisis since. That scared me silly for a long time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'd imagine it fairly evident that they must have made a typo...instead of "should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?", they clearly meant to refer to Pomoxis , & the comment ought to have read "should we cite the crappie Gabor paper here?"
I think the point is that standards and professionalism are slipping, even in science.
No, the point is that standards and professionalism are low. To show that they are "slipping" would require showing that they were higher at some point in the past. Crappy, poorly edited papers are nothing new.
In this study, we have used (insert statistical method here) to show that the quality of papers was declining.