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What Happens When Nobody Proofreads an Academic Paper

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-will-now-compulsively-check-this-post-for-typos dept.

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.

3 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Have seen this several times as reviwer... by gweihir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Have seen this several times as reviwer... by timeOday · · Score: 3, Interesting
      "Peer review is broken" is such a broad statement, it's like claiming "clothes today aren't well-made." Peer-review is as good or bad as the individual journal.

      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. I say that because the ease of communications now helps, and because of all the progress and recent focus on repeatability and avoiding statistical pitfalls. (A lot of reporting on this implies it is somehow a new problem, but there is no reason to think that).

  2. Re:Big woop by sjames · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.