Manuscript acceptance based on perceived capability of the laboratory
February 25, 2016
Dave asked:
I think about it primarily in the form of career stage representation, as always. I like to get reviewed by people who understand what it means to me to request multiple additional experiments, for example.
and I responded:
Are you implying that differential (perceived/assumed) capability of the laboratory to complete the additional experiments should affect paper review comments and/or acceptance at a particular journal?
I’m elevating this to a post because I think it deserves robust discussion.
I think that the assessment of whether a paper is 1) of good quality and 2) of sufficient impact/importance/pizzazz/interest/etc for the journal at hand should depend on what is in the manuscript. Acceptance should depend on the work presented, for the most part. Obviously this is were things get tricky because there is critical difference here:
This is the Justice Potter Stewart territory, of course. What is necessary to support and where lies the threshold for “I just wanna know this other stuff”? Some people have a hard time disentangling their desire to see a whole ‘nother study* from their evaluation of the work at hand. I do recognize there can be legitimate disagreement around the margin but….c’mon. We know it when we see it**.
There is a further, more tactical problem with trying to determine what is or is not possible/easy/quick/cheap/reasonable/etc for one lab versus another lab. In short, your assumptions are inevitably going to be wrong. A lot. How do you know what financial pressures are on a given lab? How do you know, by extension, what career pressures are on various participants on that paper? Why do you, as an external peer reviewer, get to navigate those issues?
Again, what bearing does your assessment of the capability of the laboratory have on the data?
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*As it happens, my lab just enjoyed a review of this nature in which the criticism was basically “I am not interested in your [several] assays, I want to see what [primary manipulation] does in my favorite assays” without any clear rationale for why our chosen approaches did not, in fact, support the main goal of the paper which was to assess the primary manipulation.
**One possible framework to consider. There are data on how many publications result from a typical NIH R01 or equivalent. The mean is somewhere around 6 papers. Interquartile range is something like 3-11. If we submit a manuscript and get a request to add an amount of work commensurate with an entire Specific Aim that I have proposed, this would appear to conflict with expectations for overall grant productivity.
Representation in manuscript review
February 25, 2016
One of the things that determines success in science careers is the opinion ~three peer reviewers have about your manuscript as offered up for publication in a given journal.
Hopefully I do not have to rehash the way that journal identify of a scientist’s published work affects career success.
Hopefully I do not have to rehash the way that bias creeps into what otherwise is supposed to be objective analysis.
And let us leave your well-intentioned, but hopelessly naive calls for blinded peer review aside until that nirvana is reached.
Do you think about reviewer diversity at all? Many journals publish a year-end list of all reviewers (these don’t say how many each reviewer wrote, of course). Have you ever scanned them for, say, gender balance? If you are an AE or EIC….does diversity* concern you?
On the author side, would you work to ensure your suggestions for potential reviewers are not biased? Do you ask for about as many women as men? Does ethnic or other minority characteristic of your suggestions play a role?
I’m guessing the answer is no?
I have taken to trying to suggest equal numbers of male and female reviewers when I submit a manuscript. This is pretty simple in my fields of work, so long as you think about it.
Other forms of representation? Not really possible, is my first thought. But….now I’m thinking about it. Maybe I’ll put a few people on my usual lists that I do not typically consider.
And when I get a chance I’m going to go through those published reviewer lists. I’m curious how the journals I think of as being in my field are doing.
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*Editorial boards are another place to look, those are published.
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