Monday, August 8, 2011

Physical Review has changed my opinion about peer review!

Couple of months ago, I posted something expressing my anger and frustration about scientific peer review. I had a hard time then dealing with the referee's comments related to one of my papers. Sometimes referee suggest some more work, and after I actually do them and resubmit, the referee comes up with some other objections and reject the whole paper and the whole process cost me several months. Sometimes the situation is even worse. The editor responds like this: "One referee recommends publishing your paper and one referee doesn't. Hence I decide not to publish your paper." I am not kidding, this indeed happened with me. But after I started sending papers to Physical Review, my opinions about scientific peer review have changed. No matter they publish your article or not, the comments of criticism they send are really helpful. It helped me learn much beyond the content of my paper, and in some cases improved the quality of the paper by several times. Rejection on the basis of concrete justifications is never depressing, it is rather encouraging to do better. I have become a big fan of Physical Review now and would always prefer to send my articles to them without worrying too much about impact factors. But of course, I have not communicated with many other publishers, so can't comment on whether they will be better or worse than Physical Review in terms of reviewers comments.

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