After over 30 years doing research in an engineering discipline (essentially machine-learning) I am now researching in what can broadly be described as computers in medicine. I recently submitted a paper to a journal that covers this area and was a little surprised to receive an email from an unnamed editor that, as well as requiring me to make specific changes to the structure and content of the paper, asked me to "suggest at least three international potential reviewers from different countries.”
I understand that different branches of Science have different publishing cultures, but I had never before been asked to name referees fro a paper. I had always assumed that journal editors were very distinguished people in their field who had a wealth of experience and knowledge of the field, and contacts. An important part of their job is to quickly review a submission to their journal and say “Ah, yes, X, Y and Z would be suitable people to review this topic”. The editor who corresponded with me may be one such, but I can’t check, as they do not supply their name. They could just be an employee of the publishing house who then sends the paper off to the three reviewers I name.
These reviewers are highly likely to be people you know, have worked with, possibly are quite friendly with, who will be sympathetic, at least, to anything you’ve written. This strikes me as, at best, unhealthy, and at worst, something that potentially undermines badly the principle of independent peer review. Some Googling showed me that the practice seems to be quite common.
What do people think about this? Is it something that should be banned or am I making a fuss about nothing? My position is clear: a journal editor should know to whom they should send submissions for review, and so requesting review names is unnecessary and a bad practice.
Being a referee is a thankless job. For example, I know in domains like Production Research or Material Sciences quite often the reviewer is retired from the field. And they do function as you hoped. However, getting active researchers to review especially on time is difficult. This is slowing down publication dramatically. Time to publish maybe critical in fast-moving fields or worse when lives are on the line like in medicine. So quid pro quo, as you noted, is being more widely used." I'll review your paper if you review mine." Not at all ideal, but sometimes the only way to accomplish the task in the world of ultra specialists. What I mean to say is if only about 20 people in the world are working in this field
A. Because of the use of jargon, initials, cited work to position the paper, and so on only those, twenty or so people can understand the article.
B. It is so bad that even when they don't name the referees I have seen them identify the reviewer from the referee's comments. It goes like this:
"Ah... that's Olaf Gorsky from Belarus, I'd better cite one of his papers or someone from his coterie if I want to get this approved."
Well you get the picture
Chris
PS Stephen, I have always wondered why computers were never used for patient dianostics. I remember an experimental if-than tree program on a computer in the early 1970s created by some of the best doctors at the time that diagnosed patients better than 90 percent of actual general practitioners. The software had only the patients' typed in input and the doctors actually saw and were able to touch the patients. Remember the computing power at that time was ridiculously poor. Is that the kind of projects you work on
Dear Christopher Gerard Yukna ,
Thanks for your comments. I understand what you say about the difficulty of getting highly research-active experts to review submissions on time, but I'm not sure how it relates to my original point. Do you mean that we should recommend non-expert or non-active people to review our paper to ensure it gets reviewed quickly? That wouldn't be good. My point remains that the Editor should know who the best reviewers for a submission are or they are not really qualified for the job. And the editor will ensure that they pick reviewers who are as neutral as possible, though for very small or very specialised research fields, this may be difficult.
As for diagnostics: computers have been used for years now as diagnostic tools and the best algorithms are very good indeed. Most of the effort is concentrated in automatic diagnosis from medical images. The project I am working on is about diagnosis of dizziness from eye-movements: see https://sites.uea.ac.uk/cava-project
Most of the effort is concentrated in automatic diagnosis from medical images.
I have helped to write papers on signal transmission and treatment of medical images using logarithmic image processing or edge detecting most of which I have forgotten;-) However pure and simple machine dianosis from basic questions has never been implimented to my knowledge which always seemed such a waste.
Do you mean that we should recommend non-expert or non-active people to review our paper to ensure it gets reviewed quickly?
No, (see below) but you are right there are intrinsic criticisms implied. I don't know how to soft pedal these
1. Specialists since at least the 1970s have been learning more about less and less. As Jean Jacques Giradot once said to me; Knowing almost all about a subject that is approaching nothing. Hence, you can even see it in the change in the language, example Material Science morphs into Material Sciences.
2. The transfer of discoveries from closely related fields takes in the order of ten to fifteen years even today. Dentists and biologists discovered that aterial plaque and dental plaque are chemically identical and have he same bacteria living in them in 2004 and now ten years later
Article Linkages between oral commensal bacteria and atherosclerotic...
I believe this is in part to do because each discipline has its own lexicon. Let's take something basic Hydrogen and Helium the two lightest elements. To a chemist those names don't change, but to an astrophysist those are cosmic rays or charged particles in the atomic realm they become a proton and an alpha particle.While not experts in a single domain there may exist other reviewers slightly outside the subject who could see the significance or point out that the work has already been done. This, as you underlined, is the danger of incestuous science.3. Among the over 600 articles or I have proofread, by mostly but not all nonnative speakers of English, could be found papers where Scientific English cloaked the meaning or even the insignificance of the work. Much to my chagrin, occasionally I made the paper too comprehensible and rendered the article unpublishable;-) Not to worry they found another journal to publish in that accepted poorer English and never engaged my services again.
The editor should know who the best reviewers for a submission.
Stephen,I believe you have found the crux of the problem. I can turn this statement around and come up with a powerful question.
How can any Editor know who is appropriate to review an article in today's world, when there so many international researchers splintered into so many subdomains?
Or How can we open up reviewer opportunies without sacrificing quality?
What techniques, protocols or cognative aids need apply?
Forgive me...Let's take the example of your latest paper:
Nystagmus during an acute Ménière’s attack: from prodrome to recovery
Sorry, I could not understand the title... only a vague reference to what I assume is a disease. There are very good reasons why to render visible quickly your work to researchers in your field. This is not a critique it is very common.
In fact, I loved the abstract, it is perfectly comprehensible and quite intersting. I assume I would enjoy reading the rest of your work
So if I were the editor and just used the title I could try text mining
A google scholar query of prodrome Nystagmu Ménière’s yields 544 results with your paper first. Could I search through this corpus or collection of artcles for appropriate reviewers.It might still be inbred but probably more neutral than ask you to provide them. Obviously more sophisticated AI could include synomns and words like dizziness, eye moements etc. This was just an idea, but it is a great problem
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