Blogrolling: Brazillion Thoughts

Since the presence of ScienceBlogs (Brasil) is a little subdued compared to that of ScienceBlogs (German) on the ScienceBlogs (English) pages, I thought it worth a reminder that Sb (Brasil) maintains Brazillion Thoughts as an English-language translation of some of the Portuguese-language blogging that is their normal fare.

Repost: Peer Review: Friends and Enemies

This was originally posted June 22, 2007.

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Perhaps “advocates” and “detractors” are the better terms. This is one of those heuristics that might help with crafting responses to the Summary Statement or the paper review. Others have views that touch on the topic for example MWE&G has the following in a recent post:

if you’ve hooked your primary reviewer into being a passionate advocate for your proposal, that will likely come through as well. If the summary statement lacks any sign of someone going to bat for your work, then you did not make your case even to the reviewer who should have been most excited about your project.

The heuristic is this. In situations of scientific evaluation, whether this be manuscript peer-review, grant application review, job application or the tenure decision, one is going to have a set of advocates in favor of one’s case and detractors who are against. The usual caveats apply to such a strict polarization. Sometimes you will have no advocates, in which case you are sunk anyway so that case isn’t worth discussing. The same reviewer can simultaneously express pro and con views but as we’ll discuss this is just a special case. Etc. Nevertheless there are a couple of points which arise from this heuristic which apply to all of the above situations and suggest concrete approaches to both original presentation and, where applicable, in revising the proposal/manuscript. We’ll take the case in which one is crafting a revision to a grant in response to a prior critique as the example after the jump.