ntil recently I believed that peer reviewing papers was practically
a sacred duty in science. I enjoyed learning what my colleagues were
doing and hoped my constructive comments would help them do
better science. But it's now clear to me that reviewing papers is
a waste of perfectly good solitaire-playing time.
It takes half a day to review a paper. You have to check whether their citations really represent what the papers said (which means reading a couple dozen articles). You have to re-do their statistics to find out whether they did them correctly. You have to figure out whether their conclusions are sound or whether the article is just an ad in disguise. For review papers you have to evaluate whether they describe the state of the field accurately.
Most often they don't, so you write the comments as politely as you can, re-read them to make sure nothing you say sounds snarky, and recommend revision. Then a week later the editor sends the exact same paper back with an irate response from the authors who are outraged that their masterpiece of misinformation didn't sail into print.
I didn't go into science to get into arguments with people. It's hard enough navigating personal interactions in academia, when any offhand comment could incur the wrath of the university bureaucrats. Doing research is stressful enough and the prohibition on telling jokes or being friendly just makes the job all the more unpleasant.
To add injury to insult, if you review one paper, especially if—heaven forbid—you praise it, it puts you on the publisher's good guy list, and you're then inundated with more papers to review. I routinely get so many that my email client has decided they're spam and I don't see them for weeks.
That's where our university IT guys really shine. They've found the ideal way to reduce the load on their servers: pick the single worst email system known to man and force us to use it. The one they have now logs me out five times a day, then draws a time-consuming animated graphics logo showing what is apparently supposed to be an envelope with a letter coming out of it when I try to get back in. The only thing that would be more effective would be to move to 2FA.
Good journals . . .I've heard of them
During Covid, it was clear that even so-called top journals viewed peer review as a mere formality. We had a feeding frenzy caused by the government's funding spike and the desire of researchers to cut whatever corners they could, thinking they were doing good deeds. Those two factors led to an avalanche of some of the worst papers in history. Drug trials were done without placebo groups in the belief that if the drug worked it would be unethical to deny it to the patients in the placebo group. Others were done with the treated group in one hospital and the controls in another, on the other side of the proverbial tracks. Many were done with an almost malicious intent to discredit a drug that they believed was gaining support from people they hated for political reasons.
These were among the worst papers I'd ever seen. Their conclusions were clearly not supported by evidence, yet they all passed peer review and were accepted by “top” journals.
Now journals have a new tactic: they publish your name and affiliation if you recommend publication. The idea is to disgrace and humiliate the reviewers, thereby getting the editors off the hook, if the paper gets retracted. So, do we get to defend ourselves if the journal's self-proclaimed imaging expert comes along and incorrectly decides that somebody faked their Western blot? As if.
Oh, and those virtue-signaling editorials
Then there are those editorials. For whatever reason, many journal editors seem unable to figure out that politics and science are opposites. If a journal editor takes a political stand, no matter whether on the left or right, they're telling us that alignment with their political views is required for publication in their magazine. No longer is it just the loony ones like Nature and The Lancet. They're almost all political now. That means the credibility of the articles they publish suffers as well.
So screw 'em. I won't support the politicization of science.
The science may not be settled, but the cost/benefit ratio is settled, and it's way over 1.00.
jan 12 2023, 5:25 am
