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.

Comments

Have seen this several times as reviwer...

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Have seen this several times as reviwer...

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

Re:What Happens When /. Headlines...

[Anonymous Coward]

A more useful article than TFA is over at retractionwatch.

How could this happen?

[pesho]

Obviously Gabor did not review the manuscript.

The lesson we can all learn from this:

[Mantrid42]

Shit happens.

Re:Error: They did not use LaTeX

[vux984]

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.