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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.
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.
Ten years ago I would've agreed with you, but word processors have caught up and they all have very good commenting systems now.
This was technically weak authors (not using comments in the first place), a poor internal review process, and a terrible peer review process. Thinking about it more, it's not that surprising. Inventing some percentages, say 10% of authors don't use comments and 5% of peer reviews would miss it (1 internal, 2 external). You would have a roughly 1 in 10,000 chance of this slipping through. That gives more than a hundred such mistakes per year which feels much too high, but let's run with it for now.
Statistics on how well read the average article is are hard to come by. You can get download statistics and citation counts but neither requires the article to be particularly carefully read. There was some research which showed an incredibly long tail - roughly 90% of papers not being read outside of the authors & reviewers. With those kinds of statistics we'd have ten papers containing gross typos being read per year. A chunk of those would only be skim-read, and a chunk of the rest would have the reader quietly chuckle over the mistake instead of telling the world. So it looks like my 10%, 5% numbers were a bit pessimistic and reviewers are more careful than that, but not by much.
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.