Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Reasons for reviewer anonymity #7,654

An Nth-hand comment from elsewhere, no names no pack drill:
I reviewed a paper a few years ago, and only when it was published did I realise I was a co-author!
I literally LOLed. And by "literally", I mean the literal sense of "literally", not the new aliteral definition of "not literally". Move over "pal review", the new kid on the block is "self review".

3 comments:

Martin Vermeer said...

Well the editor goofed, obviously. But one is left to wonder what the author/reviewer's contribution really was if he didn't even recognize the paper?

Though, I must admit that there was one conference paper with my name on it, that I only discovered many years later on the Internet. A report on ongoing work of a multi-institute research team to which I indeed belonged, but to the writing job of which I was never invited and drafts of which were never sent to me as well as I can remember. Not good.

James Annan said...

I'd guess it might have been some sort of multi-model analysis, in which the PI of each group generally adds their name for having supplied model output. I don't actually know about this particular paper though.

David Young said...

I've actually had very good experiences with peer review. Despite my complaining about positive results bias in CFD, our papers have received excellent reviews and journals have been fast to publish them. I won't attribute that to paper quality, because I don't think our work is that good. :-)

However, judging from what I've seen recently revealed, I'd say climate science doesn't have the same track record. I guess James, you were a co-author on a paper that was rejected with no good reason at least according to Lucia about model vs. data trends, I recall.