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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.
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.
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.
I do not agree. The "reviewers" were probably the lazy, incompetent type that gets more and more common these days.
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 was not in the version that went to the reviewers.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. In my cooperations with others we never hid comments to co-authors in LaTeX comments. Otherweise, co-authors who work on a printed copy first would have seen them too late or not at all.
Obviously Gabor did not review the manuscript.
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...
In LaTeX (and Word for that matter), I always prefix my notes with @@@ because that is a string that nnever occurs in normal text (easoly searchable) and that sticks out visually like a sore thumb.
Percent-sign-prefixed comments ("this needs an update") are much easier to overlook, or even guaranteed to be overlooked during proofreading. At least, I don't proofread my LaTeX markup, but rather the typeset document.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Shit happens.
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 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.
Is the Gabor paper crappy?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
This is a natural consequence of random changes to personal and social preferences over time. You grow up with the particular set of preferences that is accepted by the majority and they become your norm. Over time the preferences in society change and the majority opinion changes so you naturally move from being in the majority to the minority. What was once the accepted majority view becomes a minority view and your opinons become out of step with the rest of society. The older you get, the more this happens and the more you feel out of touch with the "modern" world.
The real problem comes when we consider the majority opinion to be morally superior to the minority opinion. Since these opinions change randomly over time it becomes inevitable that views and attitudes that we form when young become less morally acceptable when we get old, and the attitude of those around us becomes less morally acceptable to us. So we are left with the choice of conforming to the current morality or sticking with the morality that was prevalent when we first formed our moral framework.
The alternative is to follow an absolute moral framework that does not change over time. In this case you will always be out of step with the rest of the world, but at least it won't get worse as you get older!
[..] When you have a million versions of closed-source MS Office files floating around, this shit happens. Another reason to use open formats.
Is there an Internet Law that says "Whatever the real cause of the problem, there is always someone who will blame Microsoft"?
Not true. Nearly all people from my generation (35-40) I know complain how well-behaved and submissive today's youngsters are.
Yes this is exactly why my generation thinks. That today's youngsters are far less wild than we were.
zero tolerance does that.
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.
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.