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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.
Let's face it, even open formats/OSS can't make people *less* stupid.
DELETE MY ACCOUNT
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.
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
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.
"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."
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.
zero tolerance does that.
Peer-review is as good or bad as the individual journal.
While this is probably true, I would go further and say that this particular issue (from TFS) has relatively little to do with peer-review.
Most peer reviewers are not paid. When I've written reviews for articles, I'm assuming that I'm volunteering my time as an expert on the subject matter. So my primary purpose is to critique the argument, look at the design, see whether the conclusions are justified, etc.
Things like fixing commas, rewording sentences, and proofreading for some sort of stupid error where the authors forgot to delete something -- that's not my primary purpose. If I have time and I see pervasive problems of style, I might say something in the review. If those stylistic things end up confusing the argument or making the thing hard to read, I might say something.
But if I were reading this article, and there were a half-dozen comments or questions I had about methodology or argument on this page, would I bother saying, "Oh yeah, and don't forget to fix the stupid missed citation!" Maybe. But it wouldn't be my highest priority.
I don't know what happens at this journal, but most high-quality journals have at least some copyediting done before publication. If the author didn't catch this error during revision, it should have been caught by the copyeditor. But the peer reviewer? Are we going to ask for expert volunteers in some academic discipline to fix commas next?
Granted, the average quality of "journals" has probably plummeted in recent decades as there are far more PhDs, papers, and journals than in the past. But by the same token, the quality of the top 100 journals (or any fixed number) has probably increased.
It depends on what you mean by "quality." If, by "quality," you mean the level and rigor of articles and research in major journals, maybe you have a point.
But, if by "quality" of a publication, you mean the copyediting -- that has absolutely DECREASED in recent years. I can't tell you how many sets of proofs I've seen with all sorts of idiotic formatting errors, places where an editor tried to fix prose or move something in the layout and caused an absolute disaster to happen, etc. Heck, this isn't just articles -- I've seen recent books from major university presses that seem to have the same level of copyediting a cheap romance novel would have received 40 years ago. And heaven forbid that you have some complex set of figures or images that need to be laid out in a specific way -- the designers seem to go out of the way to screw things up by resizing or moving things about, even if you send them images designed to fit the page layout precisely.
I haven't read the article referenced in TFA. But this all sounds like a proofreading and a copyediting problem. Peer reviewers? Yeah, I suppose they should have caught it if that citation would actually make a difference in the argument. Otherwise, I'm not sure what this has to do with peer review quality AT ALL.