What is scientifically acceptable from a social of view when a manuscript or project is judged?
The effect of social considerations on referee decisions is a matter of culture. Some people are more emotional than others. Some people are rigorous in their decisions, some are not.
I believe that the social considerations has much less effect on referee decisions in these days.
How can this be quantified? We only rely on what referees say or decide, without having access to mental states of referees. Would referees be willing to openly admit this?
If by social considerations you mean politically correct, consensus, job and grant protecting, and group pressure, then social considerations are extremely important in referee decisions.
I think the referee should be free of preconceived ideas. s/he should do he job without paying attention of anything but the scientific value of the paper. Politeness in expressing his remarks should be essential.
Marcel, a good sociology article might be "The social norms of pal review."
Just in a few words:
1) When you are reviewing a paper, you should just follow professional criteria.
2) We all are able to tell bad news in a good way. Sometimes, your comments could be very helpful to improve the paper.
3) I agree with Mahfuz, nowadays social considerations are not so essential in referee decisions.
I like double blind reviews. Seems to be less the case now; in fact many journals now ask that we choose our own reviewers.
In some ways authors look at the review process too adversarial. To me it is a tool to address weaknesses in the paper. I don't usually chose people I know, or I at least make sure that the list includes people that I don't know, or people that I think will read it from a perspective that I wish to avoid weakness. Even when the reviewer is not that nice, there is often something to take away that makes it better in the end. I take it with a grain of salt. It's really the job of the editor to temper any reviewer remarks that are too rude, or worse, rude and off the mark.
As a reviewer I only have one pet peeve. It seems that some authors submit manuscripts before they are ready for the language they are being published. They are not arranged as a scientific article should be. It is very difficult and unfair to ask reviewers to correct these kinds of mistakes. A few here and there where better clarity can be achieved is not an issue, but if I'm rewriting swaths of paragraphs to fix issues with language - it's hard to get a helpful review out of me because the content becomes exponentially harder to critique.
When I review a paper, the very first thing I ask myself is whether the results are interesting enough to publish; the second is whether the statistical analysis is competently done (it doesn't even have to be the way I would have done it). I rarely reject a paper. At that point I work very hard to try to improve the paper. I put a lot into my reviews.
The worst reviews I receive are not the rude ones. It's the semantic ones that critique you not on whether the result for the data you have is valid, but whether you did it the way the reviewer would have done it if they had data you don't actually have. That might be okay for a graduate student defense, but getting published is peoples' livelihood, and nitpicking a paper that does have technical merit doesn't help anyone.
I'm old now and have reviewed a lot of papers and have received a lot of reviews. Standards have changed over the years. 40 years ago, reviewers were thorough, helpful and direct in their criticism (while also polite). I often received help from reviewers, who were always anonymous. Many are still like that, but I have received a few atrocious reviews in recent years. These have been careless reviews with undeserved criticism (sometimes, but not always, accepted by the editor). As a reviewer, I try to be helpful to the author, and try harder when the author is obviously a beginner. This is a 'social consideration' that I consider desirable. There are also undesirable social considerations in reviewing, and the worst one has been with us for a long time. It is the reviewer who uses the review process to delay (or even block) a paper that will be published before the reviewer's own work is ready for publication. Using the review process for competitive advantage is extremely unfair and scientists should be aware that it does happen, even though it is rare (maybe 1%).
Dear J. H. M. W.,
Yes, it can happen that authors have to wait unusually long to receive comments on even a short/simple manuscript.
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