Saturday, October 23, 2010

Scientific Peer Review sucks!

My experience with Scientific Peer Review have been really bitter so far. I feel cheated most of the times by the referees. After the first review they ask you to correct something as well as include something. After you really include all of them and correct the earlier mistakes, if any and resubmit the manuscript, they come up with something else which they did not mention at all in the first review. And it keeps going like this. There are two disadvantages of it: your paper remain unpublished for a long time and you have to give lots of time after the corrections, modifications which you could have devoted for another work you are doing. Of course, you learn a lot as well in the process of constructive criticism. I think the referees should mention all the defects, shortcomings in the paper in the first review itself. From second review onwards they should limit themselves to their comments in first review and the author's response to them. Asking a complete different question (which sometimes looks more philosophical and have no connection to the subject matter of the paper) in the second review is cheating to me. It shows that the referee in fact does not really want the paper to be published in the journal, but somehow pretending to be diplomatic by not rejecting the paper at the first go. I would really appreciate if they directly reject the paper at the first go, without wasting my time in going through N number of revisions. Then at least I can move on from that specific journal to another one (may be with lower impact factor) and get it published within shorter time. I wish there were a better way to get our works recognized rather than going through the tedious process of peer review.

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