Do you feel that in some rare cases some reviewers are subjective?
When they do not find much to reject a paper, they claim that English is very poor, they put harsh conditions that exceed the quality of the material used by authors who have not more sophisticated and they need to have a year or more to redo the experimental measurements!
Sometimes they want to please the journal saying that there is no originality and when it comes to a theoretical treatment of data already published, they say there is no experimental part, so it must be rejected! When an author discovers a new thing that has no previous theoretical basis, they ask him what is the theory used? Hence, the finding remain hidden and do not pass to scientific community for its kitchening.
Sometimes you can smell jealousy if not you think to racism which I don't believe exists in this period !
You can tell us your strange and surprising stories encountered , it opens eyes to our new young researchers ...
It is true that some (not all) reviewers comment too long means very subjective and others comment too short (objective). However, I like reviewers who put long comments. Although, it takes time to read those comments before rectifying but such comments help to understand the objection clearly.
@Tarek Selmi, I agree with you. I myself receive and review papers free of cost of some famous journals but they never offered me to get published my papers free of cost.
Noureddine,
I am a little late in responding to this post but I thought I would contribute as I came across this while searching for comments on the journal review process and some interesting point are made.
As someone who has reviewed journal submissions I would firstly propose that the quality of writing is important, as it is a critical part of making sure the paper is written concisely and clearly. However this should not detract from the fundamental content and research presented in paper. My suggestion here would be to utilize the services of an editor to highlight areas where the writing could be improved before it is submitted for review.
Another issue which I believe is important is the point you made about racism. Any papers I have reviewed required the author's identity to be confidential so its hard to come to that conclusion, unless the paper itself reveals the race of the author.
Finally, I think as academics we should be prepared to accept the constructive criticism which emanates from the review process. I would hope that reviewers clearly set out why they don't agree with the paper or why they have raised the criticism.
I agree that the work involved in rewrites is troublesome and may leave us feeling dejected or overly-criticized, but that is all part of the process of creating robustness in our research.
There is always a hidden subjectivity in peer reviewers. It's human. We cannot control all our internal sensations. At least, there a very small subjectivity, but in general, a good work leads to a dominant objectivity.
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