Ludicrous academics for $200, Alex
April 2, 2018
Just when I think I will not find any more ridiculous things hiding in academia…..
A recent thread on twitter addressed a population of academics (not sure if it was science) who are distressed when the peer review of their manuscripts is insufficiently vigorous/critical.
This is totally outside of my experience. I can’t imagine ever complaining to an Editor of a journal that the review was too soft after getting an accept or invitation to revise.
People are weird though.
DrugMonkey 
April 2, 2018 at 11:58 am
If you don’t think your work is worthy of publication, unchanged, you shouldn’t submit it.
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April 2, 2018 at 12:22 pm
Reminds me of the French revolution joke where the guillotine blade jams a foot above the victim’s neck. Suspecting divine intervention, the prisoner is pardoned. So is the next and the next. The fourth prisoner in line mounts the stage and looks up at the device and says, “Wait a minute, I think I can see where the problem is.”
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April 2, 2018 at 1:45 pm
MH,
Exactly! I may admit it was made better through review later, but I always think they are ready to publish when I submit them!
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April 2, 2018 at 2:26 pm
The only thing I’ve heard is the complaint that the reviews took too long, with the implication being if the reviewer wasn’t adding much, why was it delayed.
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April 3, 2018 at 9:50 am
I did say something to the editor when I got a positive review for what turned out to be a completely different paper. I did not say anything when I got a short referee report saying “I can see nothing wrong with this paper, and should be published as is” – because the rest of the report showed that the referee at least understood the field well enough to judge.
Michael Hoffman is totally right that basically, you shouldn’t be expecting referees to fix your problems. But I’d be tempted to say something if I had a paper accepted based on two three-line reviews, though. Maybe only after the paper was published. But if referees aren’t doing more than writing, “Yeah, seems good,” you aren’t getting value for the time and $ invested in the publication process, and we should just all switch to arxiv-only.
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