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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.
If anyone cares to read the passage with the insert here's a twitter pic of it in use.
A more useful article than TFA is over at retractionwatch.
There are two types of reviewers: The valuable ones that actually read a paper and try to understand it,...
I actually had a look at the paper in question.
I've probably got some details wrong but it was mainly an experimental study where they look at two closely related populations of fish - one in a toxic sulfur hot string and the other not. They find that females in the sulfur hot springs have a preference for (male) fish with spots while the other females don't have a preference.
But then they launch into a pages of random speculation about what this observation might, or might not, mean (i.e. they had no idea). Maybe someone in the field would find it deeply insightful but it looked to me like they were just padding out the paper. Anyway, the bit about the "crappy Gabor reference" was in this section.
So what do you do if you're reviewing the paper? Do you try to take the random speculation seriously and spend days trying to make some sense of it and give it a meaningful review? Or do you just figure that the real value of the paper was the experimental observation and ignore the rest?
Given that there's a finite number of hours in the day and lots of real science that needs doing, it's actually a tough call.
This could have been avoided if the authors had used LaTeX for writing their paper.
Hardly. This would have been avoided if the authors had written:
(************ SHOULD WE CITE THE CRAPPY XYZ PAPER HERE *************)
And then it wouldn't have gotten missed even in Notepad. In anything more advanced than notepad I'd also format it bold, and in red too.
Arguing for the commenting features of latex presume they would actually know about the feature, AND choose to use it. For all I know they did use latex, but didn't bother to mark it as a comment. (I mean, they probably used Word, and they didn't mark it as a comment with that either, which they could have done -- so why would switching to latex make them use the feature??)
But using the commenting feature would also potentially be a detriment. They may well WANT their own review, and internal reviewers to see this stuff, so that they can render an opinion. Having it simply omitted from the PDF or printout they are looking at means they don't see it, and can't mark a note ... "Hey -- you should cite that paper" or "don't bother with that"... in their review notes.
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.
So what do you do if you're reviewing the paper? Do you try to take the random speculation seriously and spend days trying to make some sense of it and give it a meaningful review?
If you're going to do peer review, then yes, you should try to make sense of it. How is that even a question?
Secondly, if the paper has serious problems with most of the content, of course you should reject it and explain why. Then the author can fix it and resubmit. It's not like rejection is some kind of permanent, damaging thing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."