Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Fake Review Contest Entries #9-12



Here are a few more "fake reviews" for the Fake Review Writing Contest:

9. ER

Dear Editor,

In the future please waste your own time.

10. YN (modified only slightly from a real review)

I'm suspicious of claims to categorize behavior in the vague terms of these authors, or as has been done in the past, using the very popular statistical framework X, which claims that the only way to rationality is to have a prior distribution on possible hypotheses for every problem. The experiments seem to be toys.

11. SW

I couldn’t help but noticed that my work is not cited in this paper on (a topic that has nothing to do with my work). If my work is not going to be cited, why would I spend time reviewing this work? If the authors add citations to my papers, if only the recent ones but perhaps also one of my classic papers and ideally my 2010 paper because I just need a few more cites on that one to raise my h-index by a point, I will be happy to read past the introduction and reference list.

12. NR

If the authors had high-quality data, interesting ideas, and an understandable discussion and conclusions, I would write a positive review. In the absence of those items, I regret that I must hate this paper.


5 comments:

  1. Man, do I understand the sentiment behind #9. I recently received to review a paper that was so darn awful on every level, I really have no idea why it wasn't returned without review.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yea, #9. I know it well. I recently asked an editor if they sent me a manuscript as a joke, as it was that bad... Offensively bad.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The authors have successfully addressed every comment from my previous "accept with revisions" report. However I no longer like the paper. Decision: reject.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The paper achieves an increase of 1% on the state of the art photovoltaic cells. The proposed technique for improvement is trivial and obvious. There is no reason to publish.

    [Background: In photovoltaics efficiencies are small and hard-won, with billions of dollars riding on even minor improvements.

    The reviewer never explained why if the technique is so "obvious and trivial" it had yet to be proposed or applied in over 35 years of active research on the subject. Luckily the editor overrode the review.]

    ReplyDelete