Ok,

This question has been clubbed to death, but let's discuss it once more; here are my quick thoughts (though based on 31 years in science):

1. I only discuss articles that have no major errors in the text, and also only those that actually improves something. Hence, I assume that the paper we discuss has no major problems with the language, or has such a bad structure that it is unreadable. (There are however a quite big pile of junk papers, in most fields.)

2. The research problem (call it problem P) addressed must be clearly stated, and motivated. In fact, it must somehow "solve" a new problem that is important, or improve a lot upon an existing one.

3. Problem P must be relevant for the journal, and also be timely in the context of the research area that problem P represents. Hence, we do not want to read papers on, for example, principles or methods that we all know are overshadowed by better methods. (Read: metaheuristics, if you like.)

4. It must improve on *something* in relation to the past - not only in comparison with the papers in the journal that we consider, but in comparison with all of science. Hence you need to write a very good survey on the field that your paper is trying to improve. And if you write a survey with phrases like "see papers [12-34], you are dismissed. Why? Because you are not providing any information. A survey needs to be well-written, such that we will know where the current problem addressed comes from, why it is relevant, and how it will improve what exists today. You have to provide a VERY good and thorough survey of the development of the narrow part of the field that your new contribution represents. Hence, I would expect plenty of journal papers discussed - their pros and cons, their relevance to the topic of your paper, and so on.

5. Your own contribution is then discussed, in detail. Depending on the nature of the contribution you need to cite relevant literature; if you perform some numerical experiments in order to compare something new to the state-of-the-art, you also need to be thorough, and stay away from cheating - of which there are plenty of examples in the literature. If you prove theorems, then the proofs need to be given in detail, such that any reader with similar knowledge as you can assess whether it is right or not.

6. Provide future research opportunities. Be generous - you will be the first in line anyway. :-)

Many thanks, René Reinhardt , for your response!

Your reply is interesting and informative for me.

Ok,

This question has been clubbed to death, but let's discuss it once more; here are my quick thoughts (though based on 31 years in science):

1. I only discuss articles that have no major errors in the text, and also only those that actually improves something. Hence, I assume that the paper we discuss has no major problems with the language, or has such a bad structure that it is unreadable. (There are however a quite big pile of junk papers, in most fields.)

2. The research problem (call it problem P) addressed must be clearly stated, and motivated. In fact, it must somehow "solve" a new problem that is important, or improve a lot upon an existing one.

3. Problem P must be relevant for the journal, and also be timely in the context of the research area that problem P represents. Hence, we do not want to read papers on, for example, principles or methods that we all know are overshadowed by better methods. (Read: metaheuristics, if you like.)

4. It must improve on *something* in relation to the past - not only in comparison with the papers in the journal that we consider, but in comparison with all of science. Hence you need to write a very good survey on the field that your paper is trying to improve. And if you write a survey with phrases like "see papers [12-34], you are dismissed. Why? Because you are not providing any information. A survey needs to be well-written, such that we will know where the current problem addressed comes from, why it is relevant, and how it will improve what exists today. You have to provide a VERY good and thorough survey of the development of the narrow part of the field that your new contribution represents. Hence, I would expect plenty of journal papers discussed - their pros and cons, their relevance to the topic of your paper, and so on.

5. Your own contribution is then discussed, in detail. Depending on the nature of the contribution you need to cite relevant literature; if you perform some numerical experiments in order to compare something new to the state-of-the-art, you also need to be thorough, and stay away from cheating - of which there are plenty of examples in the literature. If you prove theorems, then the proofs need to be given in detail, such that any reader with similar knowledge as you can assess whether it is right or not.

6. Provide future research opportunities. Be generous - you will be the first in line anyway. :-)

Double blind can't always work, either. In narrow fields we are destined to be "buddies" - hence I know the scheisse that the other one spews out. :-)

I know that one eminent American free (1 quartile) magazine conducts double peer review. In the process, the reviewer sees who the authors are, their biographies. This may affect the decision, I think.

By the way, does anyone know of cases in recent years when an article published in a magazine with a low rating turned out to be high-class?

Joshua O. Ighalo : I have solid proof of the (some-time) principle of shooting down juniors who have dared to try to publish complex results in well-established journals. It simply is, whether we would like to acknowledge it or not.

I know of a case when a known author included a fellow colleague of his same level in the co-authors (favor-for-service). All we can do is to say how bad and unethical

Following

Exactly. Plenty of editors like to see "Reject" from a reviewer, and will seldom ask "Why?". There is virtually no penalty for the editor and journal to sink a manuscript - unless it is a very well-known figure, and in that case the manuscript will typically sail un-assaulted through the system.

Dear @ Peter Breuer and Michael Patriksson

You say that in fact for the reviewer with great experience is ''blind'' or ''open'' does not matter? That is, he easily guesses the author, especially thanks to the Internet? And he will protect first of all his name, fearing mistakes. It is clear that the manuscript may contain details that are not familiar to the reviewer.

@Peter Breuer

What do you think, auto-citation should be equal in weight to citation or not? After all, it is not uncommon when some articles are included into references just to fill the list.

Dear @Valentyn Isaiev,

In case of good practice self-citations are important part of a scientific paper to avoid repetition of methods, data, previous concepts, preliminary results, short reports, etc. and to make it succinct.

I am not sure whether you mentioned dependent citations as well, in this context. If yes, dependent citations are obviously part of the scientific literature of multiauthored papers, since the authors team up differently for the different projects and/or papers, but there are common concepts, models, methods that should be referenced to.

In case of an attempt of self-aggrandizement via self-citations I think the editors can do countermeasures. Anyhow it has limits: hardly any editor would accept a paper with 15 self-citations in, say, total of 40 references.

Kind regards, Balázs

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