My editorial suggestion:
"My suspicion is that many structural papers are not read beyond the author list and title, if at all" should be corrected as follows:
My suspicion is that many papers are not read beyond the author list and title, if at all.
Debasish
-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Frances C. Bernstein
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 6:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] OT: "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?"
To bolster Adrian's argument about people not reading papers:
I periodically identify PDB entries that have not been released becuase they are on hold until publication. But the paper was publshed months earlier. This means that nobody has read the paper, then tried to look at the coordinates, and then asked the PDB to release them.
My suspicion is that many structural papers are not read beyond the author list and title, if at all.
[I am not faulting the PDB in not identifying that the structure should be released. Typically the author list has changed and the title is completely different from what was submitted to the PDB.
And there are fewer of these so I suspect that the journals are getting more reliable about communicating with the PDB. And it looks like the PDB is better at finding these.]
Frances
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On Thu, 10 Oct 2013, Adrian Goldman wrote:
> ?then the issue is to reduce the number of papers people publish: this is the central problem in the system: nobody reads them, nobody cites them, etc etc. There are papers out there - quite a number - that have no cites, meaning that even the authors weren't interested in them. A long time ago, when I was at Yale, Fred Richards said that people should be judged on their 10 best papers, and that was all you should be asked to put into a grant or whatever.
>
> If we (the funding agencies, governments etc etc) did this, the number of papers would go down, there would be less rubbish to review, less money to be made by Elsevier and the open-access journals, less money wasted on the whole process - and even the current peer review system would work better because we would have more time to spend on properly reviewing that little that remained.
>
> My personal contention is that anyone who is publishing more than 10 papers a year isn't reading and understanding their "own" work - and yet there are many senior authors that have published 300+ papers in 10-15 years.
>
> Adrian
>
>
> On 10 Oct 2013, at 09:11, Miguel Ortiz Lombard?a <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Ciao Roberto,
>>
>> I'm sure the current research system works better in some fields than
>> in others. It depends on a number of factors, perhaps the more
>> important of them the amount of publications produced. Or it may be
>> as we say in
>> Spain: everybody talks about the party according to how much fun is
>> having :-)
>>
>> Agreed that peer-reviewing is a continuous, endless process. But can
>> we afford relying on the cleverness of the next generation to carry
>> out our present work and mend our present problems? That's why I
>> tried to make the distinction between peer-reviewing and really
>> existing peer-reviewing. In some fields the latter may get closer to
>> the former, sure. You assume that papers are read beyond their title,
>> abstract and conclusions, that they are read critically and
>> understood, that when flaws or reproducibility problems are found
>> these are reported, that those reports are ever widely registered by
>> the community. All that happens, fortunately, and more likely when
>> the paper is a "big one". But how often does it happen, especially in
>> "hot" fields that produce hundreds or thousands of papers a year?
>> Because science is not only about "big papers", or is it? So, is
>> really existing peer-reviewing actually helping separate grain from
>> straw? How often papers acceptance or rejection depend on factors that have hardly anything to do with science?
>>
>> Again, I don't think that these problems, if they exist and are not a
>> product of the imagination of some of us, can be solved by simply
>> improving the peer-reviewing procedures.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Miguel Ortiz Lombard?a
>>
>> Architecture et Fonction des Macromol?cules Biologiques (UMR7257)
>> CNRS, Aix-Marseille Universit?
>> Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
>> Tel: +33(0) 491 82 86 44
>> Fax: +33(0) 491 26 67 20
>> mailto:[log in to unmask]
>> http://www.afmb.univ-mrs.fr/Miguel-Ortiz-Lombardia
>>
>> Le 10/10/13 08:16, Steiner, Roberto a ?crit :
>>> Many (more) reviewers ???? - [panic on Roberto's face] Isn't real
>>> peer-review just a question of standing the test of time?
>>> A piece of work blatantly wrong will sooner or later be picked up by
>>> someone (although I acknowledge that wrong papers can have serious consequences on one's ability to get funding). Limitations on a piece of research due to whatever reason will be hopefully lessened by other authors or the next generation(s) of scientists.
>>> Overall, I don't think the current system is really that bad.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Roberto
>>>
>>> On 10 Oct 2013, at 06:57, miguel
>>> <[log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> (Sorry if you get this twice. The first time as marked as junk by
>>>> our email server. Well, it may be junk after all...)
>>>>
>>>> Hi Marco,
>>>>
>>>> Impact factor is the last refuge of the publishing system as it is.
>>>> Precisely because in this ocean of untrusted publications we tend
>>>> to believe that high impact factor journals deserve our respect.
>>>> This is more or less all right: among those who have investigated
>>>> the issue some are more pessimistic than others about the quality
>>>> of papers published in those journals. Yet, it is hard to believe
>>>> that their papers are generally worse than those of not-so-high
>>>> impact factor journals. But from a scientific point of view, taking
>>>> into account the evolution of research and publishing, the trust
>>>> that we give to high impact journals is, in my opinion, wishful thinking.
>>>>
>>>> Concerning peer-reviewing, I don't think that adding more opacity
>>>> will help. On the contrary. What I believe, but I don't have any
>>>> proof of it, is that peer-reviewing is useful only if it is more
>>>> transparent, engages in a real scientific discussion (understood as
>>>> a conversation, not as an exchange of messages separated by weeks)
>>>> and is open to (many) more reviewers. But that alone will not help
>>>> if the way research is done does not evolve at the same time.
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 9 Oct 2013 18:56:32 -0700, Marco Lolicato wrote:
>>>>> Hi scientists,
>>>>> this interesting topic brought back to my mind a similar
>>>>> discussion I had with a colleague of mine and now I want to share it with you guys.
>>>>> As Vale already pointed out, the peer-review process seems to be
>>>>> far from an ideal system: there are many papers in which one of
>>>>> the author is himself the editor of the journal in which the paper
>>>>> is published; the impact factor of a journal is becoming the
>>>>> "only" way to judge the quality of a paper (and of the authors)
>>>>> [example: one of the European Commission grants has as mandatory
>>>>> eligibility criterium that the applicant should have at least one
>>>>> paper published in a "high IF journal"...I'm asking...Why?].
>>>>> I have also the suspect (from my insignificant experience) that
>>>>> some papers are accepted in really high IF journals without a
>>>>> clear peer-review process, but basing the decision mostly on the
>>>>> authors listed in that paper.
>>>>> Anyway, for those reasons and more, I was wondering if maybe is
>>>>> nowadays needed to revisit the peer-review process. One thing that
>>>>> immediately came out was: the authors of a papers should be hidden
>>>>> to both the reviewers and the editors, so that paper will be
>>>>> judged only on the intrinsic quality and not from the names on it
>>>>> or from the country.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm looking forward to see your opinion.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Marco
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Il giorno 09/ott/2013, alle ore 15.00, Miguel Ortiz Lombardia ha scritto:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi denizens,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Now that Biology has gone missing, at least in the programs of
>>>>>> the funding agencies in this part of the world, the reflections
>>>>>> that I'm going to expose concern at best that even smaller field
>>>>>> of natural philosophy that we euphemistically call, not without a
>>>>>> twist of candour, "biomedicine". At worst, they only concern the
>>>>>> world whose limits are the limits of my language.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> As I understand it, the main purpose of really existing
>>>>>> peer-reviewing is to act as a filter. By selecting those papers
>>>>>> deemed publishable it spares us the herculean task of reading
>>>>>> every possible piece emanating from our overheated brains. This
>>>>>> actually reveals a big problem of really existing research (with
>>>>>> the caveat expressed in the first paragraph). But I'm not going
>>>>>> to venture into that problem: more clever minds have drowned in
>>>>>> its muddy waters. Back to the point, if the need of publishing
>>>>>> were not such a strong source of inspiration and we researchers
>>>>>> would feel the compelling necessity of publishing only when we
>>>>>> could write well-structured and thoughtful papers, full of useful
>>>>>> data and rich in new ideas and hypotheses, we could then read a reasonable percentage of the papers concerning our fields of interest.
>>>>>> In that utopia, peer-reviewing could be a continuous, transparent
>>>>>> and open process that would involve a relevant part of the
>>>>>> community. Not likely to happen and probably for good: knowledge
>>>>>> seems to progress by a combination of slow accretion of small
>>>>>> steps and sudden (re)interpretations of those steps.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But what is interesting to see in that utopian/dystopian
>>>>>> possibility is that really existing peer-reviewing suffers from a fundamental problem:
>>>>>> statistical significance. Because, what significance is to be
>>>>>> deposited in the opinions, whether reasonably argued or not
>>>>>> (another thorny Pandora box I won't dare to open), of two, three
>>>>>> or at best four people acting as editors or reviewers? Anonymous
>>>>>> people in the latter case, to complete the scene.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In the tension between these requirements trust is suppose to
>>>>>> build up and give us a reasonable path to pursue our noble
>>>>>> endeavours. In my insignificant opinion, in the current state of
>>>>>> matters, trust is seriously broken. Too much pressure to publish,
>>>>>> too many journals, too much money to make from publishing, too
>>>>>> restricted and opaque a peer-reviewing system... As a corollary,
>>>>>> my impression is that while many of us suspect we live in a
>>>>>> bubble, we all seem to tacitly expect that we will not see it
>>>>>> explode. A good friend of mine once offered me a book about the
>>>>>> Spanish Armada; no joke. Its title was "The confident hope of a miracle".
>>>>>>
>>>>>> To rebuild trust we need, among other things, to rebuild our
>>>>>> tools. And we better do it before the next big bang. Research is
>>>>>> not the only human activity involving knowledge and its
>>>>>> transmission, we could use some curiosity beyond our noses.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Vale.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Miguel Ortiz Lombard?a
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Architecture et Fonction des Macromol?cules Biologiques (UMR7257)
>>>>>> CNRS, Aix-Marseille Universit?
>>>>>> Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
>>>>>> Tel: +33(0) 491 82 86 44
>>>>>> Fax: +33(0) 491 26 67 20
>>>>>> mailto:[log in to unmask]
>>>>>> http://www.afmb.univ-mrs.fr/Miguel-Ortiz-Lombardia
>>>>>>
>>>>>> El 09/10/13 20:04, Navdeep Sidhu escribi?:
>>>>>>> John Bohannon wrote about his experience writing "a computer program to generate hundreds of unique papers." Thought some of you might find it of interest:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> John Bohannon. Who's Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342 (Oct. 4, 2013) 60-65.
>>>>>>> DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60
>>>>>>> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Best regards,
>>>>>>> Navdeep
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> ---
>>>>>>> Navdeep Sidhu
>>>>>>> University of Goettingen
>>>>>>> ---
>>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Miguel
>>>>
>>>> Architecture et Fonction des Macromol?cules Biologiques (UMR7257)
>>>> CNRS, Aix-Marseille Universit?
>>>> Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
>>>> Tel: +33(0) 491 82 55 93
>>>> Fax: +33(0) 491 26 67 20
>>>> e-mail: [log in to unmask]
>>>> Web: http://w2.afmb.univ-mrs.fr/Miguel-Ortiz-Lombardia
>>>
>>> Roberto A. Steiner
>>> Group Leader
>>> Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics King's College
>>> London [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>> Room 3.10A
>>> New Hunt's House
>>> Guy's Campus
>>> SE1 1UL
>>> London
>>>
>>> Phone 0044 20 78488216
>>> Fax 0044 20 78486435
>>>
>
>
