Unfortunately there is little ethics in peer review. While there are many excellent reviewers who take the responsibility seriously and provide quality and HELPFUL reviews, there are others who do not. You need to write the editor of the journal and ask if this kind of derogatory review is typical of what they want, or if they are actually embarassed to have this done. The journal should notify ALL journals in arachnology about the poor quality of the response/review. The person actually sounds like a graduate student or post doc (sorry) who has both a lot of arrogance but also a great insecurity to have to try to put an author down, rather than provide a helpful review. This person should actually be reported by the journal editor to their supervisor regarding their unethical and unscientific review. It is sad, but all of us have had bad reviewers and uncivil comments by those who actually know less than we do.

I agree with Robert John Wolff! And this is not exclusive of graduate students or postdocs. Sometimes, other more experienced researchers do these things, taking advantage of the anonymous status. The reasons are diverse since the conflict of interest to the "possibility" to be mean. You can work with the good suggestions from the good reviewers. In the case of the bad ones, you can give a response (with this, the editor will be alerted, I think). Thanks, Dragomir Dimitrov, for putting this topic to discuss.

It’s surprising the editor permitted this kind of ad hominem attack to come back to the authors. The editor usually has the privilege of rejecting that review and notifying the reviewer that this kind of unprofessional behavior will not be tolerated.

But if it’s more subtle and the editor doesn’t catch it, I suggest to point it out in your response to the reviewers. Either dismiss it (I state something like, “Such ad hominem attacks merit no response, so we offer none.”) or if it’s systemic, dismiss the reviewer (I’ve previously said something like, “Given the clear and insurmountable bias exhibited by this reviewer, we request the Editor for an independent evaluation by another peer; or, failing this, we request immediate notification so that we can withdraw this manuscript from this journal and publish it elsewhere.”).

My background on this topic: About seven years ago, my major postdoctoral work on arachnid phylogeny got a big runaround from a peer reviewer who kept asking for reanalyses and pointless additions to the paper (including stuff that was in there since the first draft). Every other reviewer signed off on the work and said it was solid. The guy added about a year to the peer review process and I was getting really frustrated. In the end, I wrote to the Editor in Chief and listed the names of three major scientists in arachnology (I’m talking really well-established spider phylogeneticists). I told the EiC that I suspected one of the three was the problematic reviewer; that all three had clear conflicts of interest with my coauthors (Giribet and Hormiga); and that I wanted the reviewer off the manuscript, or my paper would be withdrawn for submission elsewhere.

The problematic reviewer was dismissed and my paper was accepted within 24 hours. The EiC relayed back that there had indeed been a conflict and they would think twice about asking the guy for additional reviews.

Hang in there, bro.

... when I have to deal with a bad and/or unethical peer-review, I always re-read this brilliant post by @Stephen B Heard :

https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/how-to-handle-an-idiotic-review/

Hope it can help you to frame a smart reply that by-passes the ad hominem attacks—or simply cheer you up.

Once I received a review similiar to yours and....I made the review of the reviewer's comments....I won! Also I, as review editor for some journals, read some papers with no interest at all or with biases, but, respectufully of the authors and the work they made, I always suggested changes, new point of views of data interpretation, even more sophisticated analyses. I think that a reviewer should suggest rather than struncate a priori a manuscript, sometimes without giving any real indication of what went wrong in the manuscript. I would expect the same from other. My responses to these reviewers are sometimes too much aggressive but, until now, I got the better of it. My suggestion is: give always a response (whatever you want) to those reviewers and editors.

Ciao

I greatly appreciate all of the answers! It is sad this happens, but unfortunately even in a small field such as arachnology there are huge egos and difficult individuals. Those with good positions and support sometimes are the worst. We should be trying to improve all of the papers and efforts of others rather than tearing down just for the sake of tearing down. For someone like myself with no resources, support or time I just try to continue to make small contributions (to several fields). Thanks ALL for taking the time to respond!

I probably had the same reviewer like Dragomir for one of my recently published papers and for one still unpublished manuscript (about two years ago).

The remarks and the accusations are highly similar, both in words and style. Both of my (arachnological) manuscripts were roughly from the same zoogeographical scope like most of Dragomir's research, so this is covered too and increases the chance that it is indeed the same scientist.

During the last review process, the editor of the journal even felt the need to remove some pieces of the review, so I don't even know the worst parts. Like Dragomir wrote, the problem was not that the reviewer attacked the manuscript, this is ok and some arguments were helpful after all and improved the ms. It is that the reviewer somehow felt the inner need to write mean, unnecessary and partly hateful ad hominem comments.

In my opinion, the only solution would be to ban such a reviewer from future review possibilities.

All the best,

Tobias

There is "instruction for authors" on the website of the academic journal. Similarly, there should be "instruction for reviewers", and there should also be a statement on "ethics of reviewers and handling editors".

The hateful words pointed out by the questioner is an easy-to-understand harassment and can be complained to the editorial board. On the other hand, there are also reviewers who maliciously and unreasonably delay peer review process (no reply for several months or more) because of unnoticed conflict-of-interest between the authors and anonymous reviewer. Editors are sometimes unaware of such "cryptic" cases. However, it is difficult for the authors to solve such cases without the active cooperation from the handling editor.

There are reviewers who commit to return their reviews after a reasonable time but never do so, delaying the process for several months. I think this is a case of passive-aggressive conflict of interest. Editors should be more sensitive to situations like this and resolve the issue by replacing the reviewer as soon as it is noticed. How does an editor discipline an erring reviewer?

Yes, Tobias Bauer he is the same reviewer, although I'm not going to disclose his name publicly without proof. I was wondering why people like him without any expertise in the field and a hateful attitude to all the colleagues are given a platform for a direct abuses, but may be it's not only the editor's fault. Many good, proven specialists usually decline review requests because they are too busy or just because they are not interested and the editor wonder what to do, since they need the manuscripts peer reviewed before publishing. So, they end up with reviews like this. I understand this but still, it's not productive and it is not in the interests of the science.

The situations described here are very common, and frequently reflect a low level of professionalism and science, more than malice and bad intent. Unclear what is worse among these4 options. I encountered several major cases, but a minor one is noteworthy. We described a new species of pathogenic bacteria eating toddler bones, Kingella negevensis. The editor in chief (at that time from the Hebrew University) agreed that a reviewer comment that the species name was inadequate (the samples originated from the mouths of bedui children from the Negev) could reflect some political bias. I can not escape the idea that the comment was politically biased by someone refusing to accept that the coauthors describing K negevensis (this was lots of work spanning several years) are from Israel, North Africa and Europe, a perfect mixt of all 3 implied/implicated major religions. This reviewer's attitude could come from any direction of the spectrum of extremists, but is most likely belongs to the antireligious/anti-identity religion of pseudotolerance.

The main thing in this discussion is not the abusive, rude, frankly idiotic statement in the specific review or in other similar... What matters is what the editor does. Apparently, in some cases he at least skips the harshest moments, probably in many cases he ignores such homophobic manifestations and seeks a third opinion. But sometimes he obviously doesn't read and sends directly to the authors, and that's erroneous...

I agree with Maria Naumova and Cristina A. Rheims and just to illustrate it better I'm attaching a screenshot of one of the comments. I wonder how updating the general distribution of the species by adding another country to it is related to nationalism? How the editor accepts it as normal, and how are we supposed to react to this?

Hi, Blanca, I had some reviews like this in the past, and althouth they were supposed to be anonymous, I knew, who the person was. So, after the 3rd or 4th review of this person (on the same level as yours), I always list this person in the people I don't want to have my paper sent to.

I know it is very difficult, but try to answer rationaly to what makes sense, and ignore the rest. I would also add to the comments in the beginning of the answers that the reviewer was not ethical and I would suggest ecluding him from the reviewers of this journal. The large publishers have a rating of reviewers and they exclude the unethical ones from their journals.

best wishes

We know very well who the "anonymous" "person" is :) but the focus of the discussion is on the powers and responsibilities of editors.

Recently I had a similar experience of receiving disrespectful comments on a manuscript that raised the same question. I think it should be up to the editor to remove such comments. It is clear that, as an editor, it is difficult to find reviewers, and when I review articles myself, I sometimes get annoyed about the quality of some works. Still, reviews should be given in an objective and professional manner, and such ethical standards should be adopted by all journals.

It is not possible to justify putting judments pf personal value and receiving ill-treatment. It is not healthy occupy blind pairs and reviewers should not be saturated with reviews as they fall into these failures, possibly due to stress. Finally, what is the creditable acale to measure quality? The idea to produce science is to contribute.

These unprofessionnal reviews are the visible tip of the iceberg. All the crucial decisions in our careers, from grant and funding decisions and decisions for jobs are infected by the same phenomenon, and there too, the heads of committees accept these clearly biased evaluations as do many editors.

Ethical standards develop practically within social interactions and must be trained and exercized constantly within social interaction feedbacks and discussions. If someone misses such social networking over months and/or years this may lead to defective ethical practice.

We likely have to deal with some of such reviews during our career. That is always disappointing, but I believe that the greatest responsibility is on the Editor: he/she should just ignore a review like that and send the ms out to a further reviewer, otherwise the journal will lose credibility.

I'd like to mention that also Editors are humans and can be like that: once I got quite constructive comments from 2 reviewers, but then the Editor performed a further review being quite harsh and offensive. That was a very bad experience which made me unwilling to resubmit again a paper to that journal.

Reviewers and Editors are humans. Correct! But this cannot be a reason for defective ethical practice. Such defective ethical practice increases also in scientific reviews, since (a)social media (twitter, facebook, etc.) promote anonymous postings of personal opinions without any consequence which leads to more and more moral decay.

Oh, man...I have SO much to say about this. Mostly a lot of complaints with no solutions because of the way academia is generally structured, but I still think they are worth addressing. Agreed that it happens not just with papers, but also proposals, etc. One problem is that editors don’t have time, but agree to be the editor anyway; however, the way academia is structured, this is considered ‘academic service’, required by many institutions. If I were an editor, I would probably never sleep so I could take the time to try to do a good job, because I’d be embarrassed if I did a shit job...but, I also realize this isn’t possible – maybe people are doing the best they can, but if they aren’t, they could step down. Finding reviewers – eh -it’s kind of the same thing. If you don’t have time to do a good job as a reviewer, don’t do it. But do try to do it a few times a year, as this to is part of ‘academic service’, and it’s useful for both you and the author(s) and your field. So, it’s not exactly a thankless job because I think you can learn from it.

Another problem is that academia often pushes for quantity not quality, especially when one is hunting for a job. Do you want 1000 crap papers or do you want 10 really good ones? But if you need papers to get a job, it can be difficult to spend so much time as an author, an editor and/or a reviewer. It’s a problem with academia in general.

I have received, and very early in my “career”, certainly given bad reviews. I was told, as a PhD candidate, by a reviewer that I shouldn’t be allowed to be a biologist. As a person with no real status, what could I do? I just questioned myself and my career choice for about 15 years. However, “good” reviews can also be bad. I do not like when I get a review that has two comments, and they are like “put a comma here”. I know very well what I work on, and because of that, sometimes I don’t explain it well or get the point across because it’s so obvious to me. It's difficult to critically read your own writing because of this. I’ve read over my own papers 20 times, and someone else can read it and still find something problematic, or it can get published and something, somehow, after 50 reads, is still mis-spelled. So, to me, a good review can also be bad.

Other things that are annoying: You spend a good amount of time providing a review, see the published paper and none of your suggested changes were made. Kind of infuriating, and maybe a reason some people don’t like to put the time into reviewing. Maybe eds. assume that the authors made the changes and didn’t check or didn’t agree with the reviewer but didn’t let them know (although when none of the changes are made and some are typos, it makes you think they just didn’t bother to check). When this has happened to me, I have noted it, and the next time the journal asks for a review, I tell them what happened, and that I want to see the paper again after the changes are made before acceptance, or I won’t review for them, because what’s the point in taking the time to do a constructive review if no one considers the comments and suggestions?

When reviewing, think about how much work that you put into the papers you submit. When you make comments, make sure they are constructive. I see a lot of “I don’t like this” – uh, okay, why? or “this is wrong” – again, why? What’s wrong? A favorite - “???”. Exclamation points are really irritating – even if the criticism is constructive, it rubs me the wrong way. “YOU CANNOT DO X BECAUSE OF Y!!!” I usually make my response to these comments in all caps with exclamation points – because if they ed. accepts that from the reviewer, they should also accept it from the author. I have been on papers with junior scientists where a reviewer has suggested that they (and I) don’t do good science. Those kind of comments are just unnecessary. Also, remember, you can ask the editor to ask the reviewer to clarify or what they think you should do...that is part of their job. They may say “ignore it”, which isn’t great, because either a change needs to be made or the ed. should tell the reviewer their comment was junk, but it should be done. In the case of your paper, Dragomir, tell the eds. that you want another reviewer, and that this person shouldn’t ever be asked to review again, and if the ed. really wants to do a good job, they will tell the reviewer why – unless they agree with the reviewer, in which case, they shouldn’t be an editor. And there are going to be people out there that say “well, this is how reviewers are with me, so this is how I should be”. It was bad practice when it happened to them in the past, just as it is bad practice now.

Then, of course, there are the problems with for profit journals, in general. Or paywalls, so people in countries where the research was done sometimes cannot get to the papers. At one point, a journal didn’t send me my published paper, and I had to ask a friend to get it for me. Or when journals are like “the English is bad in this...we have a service you can pay an insane amount of money for.” There are people out there, native-English speakers, that will likely look over the English for you for free or less than the exorbitant amount journals try to charge. If I had to write in any other language it would be awful...it might still be awful now...but, I’ve seen journals tell authors that, and try to get them to pay, and I’ve looked over their paper, and it was seriously fine with fewer mistakes than I would make as a native speaker.

But I digress...reviewing. Here is what I do. When I get a review back, I usually won’t look at it for a while because I always think it will irritate me and ruin my day . I’ve learned to deal with that though, and it’s usually never as bad as I think (usually). I look at the comments and just type my first response – even if it’s irate and terrible – for example, for “!!!” I might type “wtf?”, or “read the next sentence idiot” – but I also maybe type things like “yes, agree” or “yes, change” or “need to think about” – these are usually responses if you have a good review. BUT, I always go back before re-submitting and civilly write out what changes were made, if I didn’t understand what the reviewer meant, or if I have good reason for not making the change (usually, something wasn’t conveyed properly if a suggestion is made, and I am the idiot – so even though you don’t want to change the overall point, there could be some re-writing that helps...and a reviewer could suggest that, but time...). If the comment was “???” I might say something like, “We were unsure what the reviewer is referring to. Could the editor please suggest how to address?”

And when I review, it is similar. If I think a paper is really bad, just really bad (usually they aren’t because those don’t get past the ed. – not to say all rejected papers are really bad), I still consider the work that went into it. I know the toil. Although, sometimes much work didn’t go into it, and that is why it needs work. And that’s usually the case – things just need work. It’s not like people are submitting crayon drawings of spiders and asking for it to be peer-reviewed and published. Typically, work has been done, the data are there. And especially when it is a paper coming from people with no or low funding, that needs to be considered. Usually, you can offer suggestions to make it a publishable paper – even if you reject it. And, don’t pretend you review papers for ‘academic service’ if you reject everything (or if you accept everything without comment). So, when I review, I go through and make every comment immediately, like “I don’t get this” or “explain this” or “wtf does this mean”, or in some cases “nationalist” – JK – never done that one. But I would never submit that. Especially because as you read the rest of the paper, whatever you didn’t understand might become evident, then you just look like a fool if you submit the kneejerk comments. After going through it, I go back and change my comments. I explain what it is I don’t get and why – often deleting many comments because I found the answer/clarification as I read or re-read. If I can’t offer anything constructive, I don’t comment, period. And again, I go back and civilly write the comments/criticisms, make sure they are all constructive. Because, if I don’t, I’d look like/feel like a giant, arrogant butthole. And maybe I’d be an anonymous butthole, but I’d still be a butthole.

Please don’t “review” this. I wrote it in 10 minutes. Again, I don’t have the answers, these are just things I don’t like, and how I handle reviews as both the reviewer and the author.

A reviewer of recent publication of mine from 2020 wrote to the editor this was insane and dangerous. I heard similar comments about the dangers posed by a book from a friend. For more ancient papers, in two independent cases, reviewers were saying that my coauthor was fine, but that I was not. I wonder how many saw this scenario where reviewers tried to push a wedge between coauthors.

Such a review is unacceptable under any circumstance and should have been flagged by the handling editor/editor in chief. Some journals allow editors to edit reviews without asking permission of the reviewer (see https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6516/515.full), though this in itself is a very questionable practice. In the journals that I edit we ask the reviewer to rewrite their comments in a constructive and non-pejorative manner. If they refuse then the review is not used.

Thankfully, these sorts of reviews are becoming less common (in my experience). I think a more pervasive problem is biased reviewing hidden behind rather bland statements. Stating that articles 'lack originality' or are 'poorly written' require qualifications, otherwise it just seems the reviewer does not like the article in question. Unfortunately, as academics find themselves with less and less time to devote to reviewing this sort of 'lazy' review seems to be getting more common. I've even had papers rejected where it is not obvious why, since the reviews provided so little content.

dear Richard James Ladle, thanks for this relatively optimistic comment, it is good to know this might be a decreasing phenomenon. Indeed, the cryptic biased review is also common. Lack of professionalism by editors gets more common. A ms with 1 + and 1- reviewer was rejected, and sent for a 3d review after we complained. The 3d reviewer got the 2 previous reviews together with the ms, which defeats the purpose of a 3d review. I asked the editor about this, and he told me he never saw the ms nor did he know about it (I have no doubts about his honesty). The ms seems handled behind his back by the publisher' editorial administrator.

I would say #Me too... where the reviewer pulls in some other author's work (author X) comparing my work with it, and stating that there were defects in Author X's work. Note that I never studied or followed or replicated Author X's work neither cited that person in my paper. And I did not get the paper anywhere that the reviewer compared with. Other reviewers were positive about the work but one reviewer's remarks made my paper rejected after 3rd review. I though agree the comments from all the reviewers made my paper better (thanks to the other reviewers) but few comments are very demoralizing

Sad and sorry you had to receive this.

A legal document like code of conduct for reviewers need to be released.

I have had some of that too! I remember a referee saying my ideas were "silly" (and similar concepts) because the ideas sinned for being different to the ones of the reviewer!

Let's face it, we are both authors and reviewers ourselves. But the system of anonymous reviews makes the deal asymmetric. In essence anonymity shields the referee and removes his (or her) inhibitions. So the first lesson is for us - we have to sign our reviews. I try (and mostly, but not always, succeed). I find this helps me tone down my own statements. Given our dual role, before complaining we also need to make sure we do not commit the same sins.

Having said that, the reviewer as Stefano reminds us (https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/how-to-handle-an-idiotic-review/) are always idiots themselves - they recommended rejecting our excellent paper!! so they must be idiots. If they are also unfair, personal, abusive, bullying or rude, I think we should write to the editor and say that this is neitehr helpful nor professional, and that we kindly ask that the revision is not sent to ref. 3. It may help...

Easy solution: Editors should ask the reviewers to sign their opinions. I always do, at least when the journal allows me to do so.

I have had similar problems with negative reviews and just downright mean reviews on some papers. One paper never did get published since the editor and all the reviewers at the time seemed to just not want it to be published (I think they were all the same people - it is a very small group of people with this kind of expertise). We submitted the paper to several different journals and never once received any constructive criticism or reasons why the paper was rejected. The reviewer comments were either items like, add ____ to the paper when in fact the item they wanted added was already in the paper, making me think that they never even read it, just rejected it outright and added made-up comments. Other comments included nasty critiques of other papers published by us and no mention at all of the paper that supposedly had been sent to them to review. To try to figure out what the problem was with the paper, we sent it to a number of different colleagues with similar expertise and asked for their comments and criticisms. Not a single one of them could find any flaws in the paper. According to them, we had dotted every i and crossed every t. Overall a very discouraging experience. In spite of this, we continue to get papers published, with very few problems as long as we actively avoid certain journals. And we don't let this incident influence how we review papers. Every review, even of papers authored by some of the biased reviewers mentioned above, is treated fairly and assessed only for scientific accuracy, grammar, and composition. Also, I like the suggestion above, by Luis Pacheco to have editors request that reviewers sign their reviews. It might help to cut down on some of the nastiness out there.

It is not necessary to be offensive to make a point. If I were in the position of editor, I would certainly not accept a review in those terms.

Definitely, such reviewers should be banned by the Editors of the journal. You may send Your personal thoughts concerning such impolite review straight to the Editor of the journal. Such things can not happen in reviewing process.

Best

Scandalous, totally inappropriate and offensive. As many above, I have also decided long ago to always sign my reviews. I agree that if the reviewer was not anonymous, he would have never dared sending this. I think that you should definitely complain to the editor.

I agree. Some European peer reviewers note if the article subjects are from Asia, Africa, or Latin America they are stronger, and by the way more intransigent, inflexible, and intolerant to proposals or some mistakes in the papers, with the consent of some editors.

Reviewers can be more negative for many reasons, and this certainly includes their views on researchers from developing countries. But the biases of reviewers might be positive toward some peoples from these areas as well. But biases are also strong against people with certain names, religions, races, genders, and more. Those of us from small schools without research support are also put down if we do not have results from high priced equipment in expensive labs, as we are expected to have what the review has to work with. There are also biases against certain approaches, points of view, and also if the article might beat the reviewer to the 'punch.' I had an article turned down due to one reviewer, and the comments were written similarly to an article that appeared six months later, as it took me almost a year for the next journal review to occur. This was in the early 80's when review was very slow, and then publication was slow.

If the paper already passed through the editor in chief, the journal is looking for direct input from the reviewers, as the thinks the paper can be improved. What I had done in some reviews that were below the standard needed, is write both the review to the editor and a direct mail to the main author telling ideas how the manuscript can be improved, even when a major revision is needed. I share Luis Pacheco's idea that the reviews should be signed, I do it too. There was only one journal I did not have the opportunity to do so.

Amanda--What was your article? I have done a few reviews that I did not want to sign because my review was negative, although polite, and I recommended not publishing. Usually I know the people or their work, or I am just willing to discuss their research and my ideas, and I sign. In one recent case where I was not all that complimentary I did not sign, but I discussed their sites in detail (I was the only person on earth who had that information as well as having written extensively on their subject), and I made absolutely clear who did the review so they could get back with me if they wanted (they didn't). I've received a couple of really negative reviews, one from a local State researcher who didn't know what they were talking about; another from someone who did know but wanted a much larger, more substantially expanded research paper than our limited subject. Rudeness has no place scientific work in general, but our purpose as reviewers is to help improve someone's work, not be an asshole.

This is an important post as it raises awareness of the responsibilities and human nature of the paper review and editorial process. In all aspects., constructive, polite and professional behaviour should be expected as standard in the peer-review process. This is obviously a bad review and experience., my main point is that this should not discourage a researcher from trying to publish the work (the worse outcome would be for the work to reside on a hard drive). Personally, I have also experienced "rude" and in my opinion unprofessional reviews related to the Industry I am in., I have submitted manuscripts with potential reviews NOT to send to (due to conflict of interest/previous behaviour)., this has generally been ignored by the editors - a no surprise the review comes back very negative and unprofessional. In this case., I resubmitted with a detailed response to review and responded to every unprofessional statement with words to the effect that this was unprofessional and not following the ethics of review (~20 statements!), I also acknowledged some comments that I agreed with an did actually improve the manuscript. I hope the response made it to the anonymous reviewer., it was eventually published.

John Greer .-. Thanks for the comments. The issue of someone recommending the rejection of an article because it was not 'large enough' is both against the spirit of science and usually the journal ethics as well. This is an important issue for those of us who do not have research support, we can only do smaller or more limited studies. These small studies can still be important. And for me I try to 'fill' in small holes where there is a lack of studies or simply new ideas to see if there is any reason for that line of research to be investigated. This is what science is supposed to be about, not just the massive NSF/NIH funded studies. I have a very small, very simple study that shows that our new techniques for determining the microbiome misses some types of bacteria but have been hesitant to complete and submit it because of those very features. And yet the field moves forward without knowing they may be missing some and thus thinking they have such great information. And yes, it is great, but is not complete or the whole picture.

James S Eldrett .-. Thanks for your contribution, and it is sad that we have to work so hard, and so much time is lost to make our contributions to science. But you are correct, we should not give up.

I had a different situation, where my paper had already been corrected twice, and both reviews were positive and encouraging to correct the manuscript, and when I was hoping that the third review will only be a formality, the third set of reviewers rejected the paper, based on.... THE ORIGINAL SUBMISSION. I was so confused with this, that to this day (and this happened 2 years ago) I still don't know what to say about the reviewers and how to express my anger.

I fully agree with your stand point! If I was the editor, I would certainly not account such review. Indeed everyone deserves the respect one claims for himself.

The editors shouldn't have accepted such a review. They should have responded to the reviewer making it clear that its tone was inappropriate. They could have asked the reviewer to reformulate it or could just ask someone else to produce a brand new review.

See my letter to the editor of the Int J Antimicrobial Agents on hydroxychloroquine. This is mainly a criticism of biased review, which has had catastrophic consequences for the whole world population. Its concluding remarks are

"Unfortunately, unbiased scientific evaluation of all the evidence at hand has become increasingly rare, with and without the pandemic. The current crisis emphasises the existential need for this mental capacity, combined with honest professional ethics, for authors and critics, with the latter deserving harsher criticism than the former."

Article Balanced evaluation of preliminary data on a candidate COVID...

I think we all get daft reviews at times - I've had one that was barely comprehensible which criticised my English - but there are sadly occasions like this where a review steps over the line. Well over the line. Some publishers seem to have better standards. I've found that BES journals are always very constructive and polite, even when they reject my papers. Others can be condescending and downright offensive. When I am reviewing a paper myself, I tend to look at the thought and effort that has gone in and look for the positives as well as the opportunities for improvement. We have a job to encourage research, not stifle it.

Yep editors should omit any review like this. Ridiculous to include insults, reviews should only be constructive criticism.

I wonder how editors can overlook such unfair review and pass on to the authors. One of friends recently received unfair review from one of the reviewers but the editor choose not to consider the comments from that particular reviewer. However, this is not often the case. I recently received unfair comments from reviewers which were quite obvious to the editor that reviewer was being unfair. But the editor still rejected my manuscript.

I do believe that we all agree that insulting and highly biased reviews, and those done by individuals with limited knowledge (ignorance, stupidity, naivete) are both problematic and unethical. The issue of a review being 'unfair' is more difficult. Why and how is it unfair? Unfortunately biases in viewpoints on scientific issues and an unfair review may be very helpful to the author as they can learn and improve their manuscript, and maybe address the issues that have led to the lack of fairness. Editors have a hard job with these reviews, as they must decide if the underlying issues are enough to disqualify the article from being accepted, or if they should disqualify it for important points within the review that they might not see as unfair but germane to accepting the paper. So while the editors should deal with issues of unfairness, I do believe they should show the author the reviews so they are aware of what is being said, and then hopefully the editors can decide based on what is hopefully a fair assessment of the larger picture with that article. We should all go over a review, and see if there are important issues that need to be dealt with. A trusted person who can give us an honest review of the review may be needed. While a truly unfair review is unfair or even unethical, the editor may have based their decision on some important issues embedded with the review. The job of an editor is difficult, but hopefully they can judge fairly across a wide range of issues. And part of the problem for me is that if they rejected my article, the review must be unfair!!!

Editors of journals in the discipline of hydrology have provided guidelines about what the reviewers should and should not do in a joint editorial published in many journals:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325037413

I do not expect that the ethics in peer-reviewing would improve, unless the system turns from anonymous to eponymous:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346963540

Dear Colleague,

The issue you are raising is quite interesting. I think it is totally unacceptable for reviewers to give hateful comments about a paper. They are free to recommend a rejection; at that moment, the authors will submit somewhere else. People should remain scientists and forget about their feelings about individuals.

Cheers

This is a very good discussion, thanks. It happened to me to receive this kind of agressive and arrogant peer reviews. Actually, those reviews are of very bad quality, since they do not help to improve quality of a manuscript. I wonder why editors consider those peer reviews seriously. At the beginning, I tried to give a correct and kind (usually, very long, because questions are numerous and not well-formulated) reply to those agressive reviewers, but finally I understood that I am just loosing my time. I think the best solution is to inform the editor that the peer review is of bad quality and agressive, so I prefer to withdraw my manuscript from their journal. It happened once (Quaternary Science Reviews) that the Editor took a decision not to forward a peer review to me apparently because it was too agressive and useless. Well, when I am a single author is not a big deal. The worst is when I am a co-author with non-European colleagues and we submit the manuscript to a European journal. It this case, I feel a REAL SHAME (objectively, I am an European) that my non-European colleagues can see how aggressive, arrogant, and useless are peer reviews considered by some journals.

That type of peer review is unacceptable in so many ways. Any reputable journal that wants to keep its reputation would black list a review of this type. The editor is well within means to simply return it with comment as to the boundaries acceptable to the journal. Another editor might decide it isn't even worth returning with an upbraid.

I had a 16 page long review of a book I published in 2019 which was incredibly aggressive and offensive with xenophobic and racist remarks. It's really not about wanting reviewers to agree with the written pieces, but there ALWAYS has to be respect by other's work. There were people complaining to the editor of the journal where this review was published but they thought that taking down the review (even if filled with hate comments and xenophobia) was a form of censorship. I did make it public and received a lot of support from colleagues. I think the review says more about the reviewer than my work, which given what they wrote about it, they clearly didn't read...

Journal editors generally have been fair when evaluating peer reviews of my own journal submissions -- apparently some editors sought out additional reviewers if there was major disagreement in original reviewer comments. I've been allowed to read any insulting original comments, but the additional reviews usually have been much fairer and ethical. But I have seen in even the highest impact journals that an editor was already biased about how to interpret still unsettled issues -- as evidenced by assignment of peer reviewers who had the same biases, and by refusal to accept submissions of rebuttals.

Gary Haynes We have seen similar biases from editors and reviewers. However with certain journals. I will call out PeerJ here the editors remained completely unbiased and objective. In my experience, a great way to reduce the likelihood of bias and insulting comments is to publish the review with the paper. Hence why I quite enjoy publishing with PeerJ (even though it is a bit daunting to have every little mistake you made on previous drafts open and viewable along with your final published paper). There are a lot of issues when reviews aren't public and editors comments are not seen by the public. I think it offers quite a bit of opportunity for those editors to unilaterally act upon their inherent biases.

I have been in both sides of that issue. In occasions I have been extremely blunt with people trying to publish nonsense, and in this occasion I had to be blunt with the editor too, for allowing such a piece of crap reaching peer review.

On the other hand, a reviewer who was pretty blunt and rejected a manuscript of mine (whose arguments he later plagiarized).

This kind of impoliteness don't bother me, what I really find unfair for us scientists is that we do not get treated fairly during peer review. More than once I got manuscripts suffering major reviews and rejections simply because a folk forgot a table or a piece of text where things he was looking for where available. This is a disease in the peer review because editors are so overcharged that they end up becoming merely paper couriers, paying no attention to the actual discussion.

Adding to the discussion, an article on the topic that I wrote last year after a terrible first hand experience....

My recent experience with review of a book proposal has been mixed, but generally unsatisfactory. Two insulting and ridiculous reviews were reapeated in response to a greatly expanded second proposal. They called the work unscholarly (despite extensive journal references), insulted my credentials (despite a Ph.D. from Berkeley) and made ridiculous recommendations (such as using goats instead of baboons as models for early hominin behavior). Four other reviews were positive but one was just a few sentences long and another used the augmented second proposal as the basis for a barrage of debatable quarrels with factual detail that buried the positive conclusion. The reviews contained numerous contradictory or unrealistic suggestions (make it more scholarly and more welcoming; add all of primate evolution from Miocene apes to contemporary monkeys). I think editors should be encouraged to evaluate the quality of reviews rather than just keep score. In discussions like this I like to reminisce about Richard Alexander's conclusion to a review of one of my journal submissions. He wrote [paraphrased] 'I wish King had included [whatever], but it's his paper not mine.' He recommended the paper and it was published.

Hi

I understand claims like Carvalho's one, because I have been there. On the contrary, I do not share the opinions of Miranda, because I think you can be blunt without being disrespectful, talking about "pieces of crap". Also I think that sometimes, and there are many examples in the history of science, some ideas that may be considered as "nonsense" by some people today (those that are the "owners of the truth"), will be "brilliant and groundbreaking ideas" in the near future. So, you have to be careful when you write a review, because it could easily be a "crap" review on its own...

Hi

The point of peer review is to give constructive suggestions, constructive criticism. It is easy to use abusive words, difficult is to conduct a good review, check if the authors are doing good science, and return something that can help the authors to make their work stronger.

If a reviewer does not take the time to work on a manuscript and has nothing to say, please do not.

I think an Editor should not accept those type offensive remarks, as they do not contribute at all to the scientific discussion

I think this situation was very unfortunate, especially as I have published many papers in Arachnology and have always found its editorial team to be very professional. I assume by now the situation has been resolved, but it would be worth mentioning to the editor that you do not want that reviewer again if you submit more manuscripts to the journal. In their new software for uploading manuscripts there is a specific section where you can write the names of people you do not wish to review the manuscript (i.e. if they could not give a fair, unbiased review).

It is clear from all the replies above that all of us have received pretty rotten reviews in our research careers. I can add a "horror" story from another journal, where an anonymous reviewer (although the prose of their reviews is so idiosyncratic that I am fairly sure who it is) used my sexual orientation as a point of criticism in their review. In that case, the comment was hidden about half way through the manuscript and was not spotted by the editor prior to it being sent to me. Naturally, they were mortified once I pointed it out, and I believe that reviewer is no longer consulted for that particular journal.

Single blind peer review is a double-edged sword, as mentioned by so many people above in their much more detailed replies. Without peer review the quality of research, in my opinion at least, would sink considerably across the board in all fields of science, but at the same time we cannot pretend that in its current form it does not allow for manipulation, unethical behaviour and downright nastiness. The only remedy is that we, as the upcoming generation, install in ourselves, our colleagues and our students the need to treat others fairly and to encourage editors not to consult reviewers who deliberately use their anonymity to belittle, delay or otherwise negatively effect the research of others.

Kind Regards,

Danniella Sherwood

When I was doing my masters in France (in the mid 1980s), my tutor has the opinion that when the electronic publication became dominant, we will have no more reviews because it will be almost costless to publish because paper and printig would be no more involved (and in fact it happened the opposite, because it is even costier to publish online now!, but this is a subject for other discussion). He thought that all scientists having a doctorate could publish (under their responsibility) and posgraduate students could publish if sponsored by their tutors... and then, you would have to accept and discuss the criticism of your papers in print, in rebuttals or similar papers published by your critics. So, if it worked that way, we will have no more reviews by anonymous reviewers, and no more authors that cannott publish their ideas because of previous "censorship" (implied in some kind of reviews/reviewers). So, I think that a part of the responsibility for bad reviews and limited access of new ideas and points of view to publication is due to the publishing system and the publishing houses that think mostly about money-making than about scientific progress and free debate of ideas. The previous review and limited acceptance of papers system seems to me only one consequence of the general publishing system (and the "prestige" system involved in it) of many - if not most- publishers, editors and journals....and the funding for scientific research that depends in a great deal on how many papers you publish and in the journals you publish, the more "prestigious" the better. Sadly, in my opinion, all this conditions the way in which we scientists work and publish, and express our ideas and theories.

The use of nonprofessional language in peer review is quite common, sadly, and the editors should set ethical guidelines for the reviewers.

Scientific criticism is important for the manuscript discussion but professional language should be required by the editors as a prerequisite for reviewers.

Academia and academic reviews are no theaters for friendly letter exchanges. One needs to learn that pretty quick. In my experience, sometimes it is fairly easy to interpret a reviewer's bluntness as rudeness or unethical language. A number of my draft MS have suffered several hard-hitting review comments. But I learnt very quickly to disengage emotions from my interpretations of reviewers' choice of words. That has gone a long way in helping make sober corrections and rebuttals.

It is fully understandable that after toiling to put a MS together, you get several 'high-score' and painful review jabs . But it is absolutely useless, in fact harmful to good science having to concentrate on the style of wordings by such reviewers instead of the gist of their comments. And in this regard, I fully agree with Everton Miranda's comments in this thread.

What I find disappointing (and Gabriel Francescol might have touched on this a bit), is a reviewer's comments based on his/her inadequate understanding of, or utter unwelcome attitude toward new, non-traditional ideas or findings - findings that do not agree with some so called 'widely accepted facts'. To me, this is the category of review that warrants concern.

Sadly this has been part of the practice in academic reveiw, although we may find some of the comments too harsh in the process but some of the languages used are too harsh

This is very unprofessional and in my opinion such reviewers should be sanctioned by the editors. I think also that some editors don't go through the reviewed manuscripts to see the reviewers comments, reasons why such unprofessional and uncivilized comments are received by authors. Reviewers can politely turn down manuscripts.

I think, most of us authors have made such experience. It runs better, if reviewing is moderated by the editor.

Reviewers and subject editors are important in this decision.

Interesting people everywhere. God bless the genuine researchers.

I have had instances where the reviewer my not understand the environment in which the research was set, This is mostly the case when most journals are in the global north and have majority of the reviewers been from the global north, Their understanding of African issues sometimes are problematic.

There have been many cases in archeology in which the reviewer has rejected the article without a logical reason. Even more tragic is the fact that the reviewer acted as if he did not know the author of the archaeological alphabet. And it lowers the value of an article, which sometimes takes a year, to a short story.

Almost every journal has peer-review guidelines, and respectful and professional language is clearly required. This is a problem of today's publishing and I think the problem is editorial.

In archeology, one can largely guess the geographical area in which an archaeologist works, and articles sent from this geographical area for peer-review can also be predicted by which archaeologist (or by which team) wrote it. This is why it has happened many times that a reviewer has rejected an article because a conflict of interest. This should not happen.

I am inviting you to have fun with my open letter to the Editor of Frontiers, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356981706

Comments are welcome.

I had such a review story recently. In one good chemistry journal, my paper had three referee reports. Two were positive, and one was extra negative; it contained only two sentences: the paper is super bad and must be submitted to other journal. The editor wrote me, that despite two good reports, my paper is awful (no reasons provided). They let us to improve the paper and resubmit. So, we did it. After resubmission, it was only one referee report: I reviewed this paper earlier, reject. The editor's desicion was rejection. BUT. But they offered me to publish this "awful" paper in an emerging chemistry journal of that publisher (this publisher is considered to be non predatory).

After such an unreasonable rejection, I feel humiliated.

To Ekaterina E. Khramtsova

Ekaterina, I sympathize with you, but, if I were you, I would not feel humiliated. You must be proud after your experience. The system is ill. Many of my best papers were rejected from a varying number of journals. I think my record is 8.

What is needed is transparency and persistence.

Best regards,

Demetris

Ekaterina E. Khramtsova,

In this situation I reply immediately that I withdraw my manuscript from their journal because the quality of reviewers is low and their behavior is unethical. I am not going to loose my time with a badly managed journal.

After reading the kind of stories referred to above, and knowing the "costs" we should pay to publish (and transfer the copyrigjt of our papers to the publishers!), my question is: is there any journal that is not "predatorial"?

Demetris Koutsoyiannis, thanks for the support!

Answering to Gabriel F question I would say most journals are feeding on researchers.

On the copyright part, as much as I know open access journals leave the copyright to the authors.

Dear Dragomir.

The referees of a research paper must always use correct and non-offensive language in their review. Unfortunately, individual ethics has a very abstract limit.

Dear colleagues,

So many researchers (even very experienced ones), suffered and still suffer from such behaviors so many times. This is very often the case when one and his teamates come from the so-called developing world and aspire to publish in international peer-reviewed scientific journals (edited by the so-called developped countries).

Indeed, many reviewers behave arrogantly towards their peers and do not even take enough time to handle the manuscript in a decent manner.

Their superiority complex overwhelms them and anihilate their objectivity and efforts towards a real honest process of ethically reviewing and bringing justice to their fellow researchers who they are supposed to righteously evaluate the work.

Now that this matter has raised and brought to light, we should await the so many reactions from the so many researchers that have experienced such bad replies from editors and reviewers.

More and more tongues would surely loosen with time...

Much of luck all of you.

Research ethics, authorship and peer review are near extinction.

The very first thing to do is to remove any possibility of anonymous reviews. Anonymous reviewing allows to do the same as twittering or facebooking his anger, disapointement or whatever negative feeling, without the need of explaining it.

It is a very simple decision to make, and this could change some behaviours.

Many times I've encountered reviewers who didn't read the paper, but just wrote some silly stuff or forced citations of their articles. In my opinion, until journals start paying for the work of doing reviews, pathological practices will be fine.

it has always been like this and it will always be like this

It is strange and quite a significant omission if they don't have publicly available publication/reviewing ethics/malpractice in the journal's website. I know that this is a prerequisite for Scopus inclusion (see here: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/how-scopus-works/content/content-policy-and-selection) and Elsevier is supposed to take these criteria very seriously into account in their evaluation of journals and conference proceedings. I know from past experience that they do.

A procedure for appeals by authors should be in place and described in the journal's website.

Totalmente de acuerdo colega. Además de respetuosas, las críticas deben ser constructivas y exponer claramente los criterios en que se discrepe.

This is very important topic.

Dragomir Dimitrov Dear don`t think more about this. Just improve the quality of manuscript and resubmit. Further, avoid such reviewers by mentioning them in cover letter `to be avoided with reason`.

Maybe one idea about review process in general: reviewers work is probably the part of scientific work, from which researchers has the smallest benefit. I think that the system itself is unethical - publishing houses of scientific literature have large incomes from publications, but reviewers (often also editors) do their work as volunteers. Therefore, publishing houses are parasites, who parasite on the goodwill of scientists to review. It is not surprising that a lot of scientists have no goodwill to do reviews or invest much time in them as they have only very little benefit from doing this work. And the result is low-quality review, or review like that started this discussion, when probably the main motivation of the reviewer is healing own ego, to helping authors or science as whole. Unfortunately, the solution to this is difficult - I think that reviewers should be paid, but it is difficult to convince publication houses to this. (also I think is that origin of this problem is business model of publication houses itself, which is beneficial for their owners, but not for researchers and science as whole; researchers did mistake several ten years ago, when let outsourcing of publishing papers from academic institutions to private companies, but this is another story)

Such a thing is unacceptable.

Unfortunately, as someone stated earlier, research ethics is becoming increasingly rare. I personally had my part of poor reviews and occasionally some hateful comments and I believe publishing houses and editors are mainly responsible for the current problems within the system. Even when ethical guidelines are provided by the journal, there are still plenty of situations when really bad, unacceptable, reviews are sent to the authors (why!?). As a peer reviewer myself, I also witnessed totally unethical situations. From one line comments "Publish as it is this" (paper with serious flaws and plagiarism that in the end was rejected by the editor) to offensive comments that ridiculed the study of the authors. And let's not start the discussion when other peer reviewers are recommending "specific papers" to be cited. The problem is that some of these reviewers are also editors.. so it all sums up in a vicious, corrupt circle that leads to a loss of scientific integrity and a loss of trust in the peer review system.