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.
What is this a social drama site now? How about some news for nerds that matters instead of crap articles like this one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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".
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.
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"
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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'.
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
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
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.
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.
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?"