Dear Colleagues,
I am starting this conversation out of curiosity, and to get a feeling on which direction research seems to be oriented to (covering different fields of engineering). For two submitted papers in the past, I got comments like this from reviewers:
1) the work is too scientific, the authors need to explain its relevance with reference to an application
2) rejection advice by the reviewer on the basis that the work is focused on a curiosity driven aspect of experimental results, but robustly executed.
Both happened for journals with a top impact factor, and well recognized in the field.
My concern and discussion point here is: are we still valueing curiosity-driven research? or does everything need to be related to an application? My stand on this is that researchers can have the freedom (something called academic freedom), to either undertake an application-driven research or a pure curiosity-driven research, provided that both lead to some valuable insights to the readers of the journal and the corresponding scientific community . Not always the curiosity driven research has an immediate application, especially if it is at an early stage. Hence, any connection to an application, becomes speculation and it is not appriopriate for a research paper. What is your take on this? did you experience similar comments? is curiosity-driven research still valued?
My first thought was exactly that, when I received the first comment few years ago. At the second time, I started having little doubts on the randomness. I hope it is still a random walk :).
Alessandro, reviewers in top journals become even more random walk. You need to make your story attractive. They call this applied, but the truth is different. In some journals, very good ones but not Nature or Science, also the maths which may look very nice makes a difference, rather than application. I have some papers which look very elegant, but were never applied. I wrote them in 1 day and were accepted very quickly. Also, be not critical of any other previous approach. Very top journals may look also for very fancy experiments...
Michele Ciavarella I agree with what you say, you also touched upon another aspect which I always found concerning in the published literature (especially in the field of tribology), maybe this deviates from the original post: "the need of fancy experiments" and the lack of experimental results, which repeat and/or confirm other experimental results carried out in a different research group and lab (in my view this is a common problem in tribology). A common criticism that I see is: experiments of this type were already carried out, what is new here? when I read papers in the literature, especially experimental papers of tribology, I always struggle in understanding which experiments are robust and repeatable and which are not, since the so called "test of time" is absent. Tribology tests are also pretty much system dependent, so this should be even more important. What gets published are results that do disagree ( generating a lot confusion, almost feeding "mysticism" in the field tribology), but the results that agree rarely go through, due to the "lack of novelty" in the testing procedure (my concern, I hope I am wrong, is that some reviewers may just be the ones who did those tests in the past). The lack of supporting and recognizing the value of experiments that can confirm previous results, and the trend to always look for new or fancy experiment, is a big problem in my view for any scientific progress in tribology, especially for a field that lacks of a general theory. Of course, at some point, when results are confirmed by different test setups, you may draw a line and say: this can be considered as known!
yes, experiments which merely confirm previous experiments usually are stopped by reviewers, strangely as this may be important. usually reviewers search for a theory to support experiments, and in the second paper even more. so if you have a paper which merely confirms some experiments and do not provide new theory, they will complain
but the hardest time I found was when I wanted to criticize a theory which was completely absurd by kassapoglou. I hard very hard time to publish the paper, and I had to do it in an obscure serbian journal. http://casopisi.junis.ni.ac.rs/index.php/FUMechEng/article/view/3768
As someone without too much research experience, I have the same feeling regarding the randomness. A paper I submitted to a top journal in tribology was rejected within a month but given a minor revision decision after submitting it to another one, also a top journal in tribology. Just random. Curiosity, I guess, might be the very origin of scientific research. Researchers, however, need financial support, where the immediate application capability is requested when applying from foundations even governments, especially for starting researchers in STEM. This might be the cause of the biased-oriented evaluation systems. Having the freedom to do something that seems "unuseful" might lead to less pressure and perhaps more findings.
@Runliang yes, I agree on the bias-oriented evaluation. Indeed, grant proposals need to be written with the application in mind. I just hope that some research papers can still stay independent from it.
Yeah, definitely. But what's interesting is that a researcher in his 40s once said " I can eventually do some real scientific research" after obtaining his professorship, which means almost everything is guaranteed thereafter. Those who are in their beginning stage have to spend most of their time fulfilling the proposals to pass the qualification and raise the group members, called surviving sometimes. And I think quite some of them are the reviewers if they get a bunch of high-cited publications, which generally are application-oriented considering the outcome requirements of their grant proposals, leading to the favorite on the same kind of papers when reviewing others. I believe that there are some curiosity-oriented papers now. But I also hope that there are more independent papers to bring more options and potentially new ideas for readers.
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