A plea for better reviewing.

I started this weblog in a rather emotional response to a poor review that a paper in 2006 recieved. Since that time I tried to keep the entries much more positive. Though I made a few mistakes along the way.

Has the situation changed in the past seven years? Unfortunately not. The vast majority of the papers I have published since that time have been rejected at the journal where we eventually published the paper. Almost invariably it is because one of the reviewers was really incompetent. This happened recently with two papers we submitted at the beginning of 2013. One has just appeared in the top chemistry journal:

Olson, J.P., Kwon, H-B., Takasaki, K.T., Chiayu Q. Chiu, C.Q., Higley, M.J., Sabatini, B.L. and Ellis-Davies G.C.R. (2013) Optically selective two-photon uncaging of glutamate at 900 nm. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 135, 5954 - 5957.

The other got a hard reject from another top journal. The reviewer simply did not understand cell signaling, neurons, the difference between one-photon  and two-photon uncaging, etc. In fact just about anything and everything in the paper he rejected. The professional editor was put in an impossible situation, as he is not trained in any of these areas, and is too busy to read our patient explanation of why the reviewer was just wrong. At least with society journals we can talk with fellow scientists who devote themselves to the thankless task of dealing with incompetent reviews.

But the situation is even more difficult when it comes to NIH grant reviews. I just got a new R21 grant with Greg Hannon at CSHL. This is wonderful a new collaboration initiated by Greg. We are trying to develop a way to capture newly translated protein in time and space. All three reviewers of the proposal liked the work. BUT even in this situation, the positive reviewer did not understand what we were doing. He cited a key paper by the lab that had developed the technique we are using, saying that we were "simply repeating what had been done previously". A very damning criticism! However, the problem was were doing something else from what the reviewer thought we were, even worse the paper he pointed also did something else from what he thought! The paper did "A", we are doing "B", he thought the paper did "C"! So when it comes to rejected grants one can only imagine the chances of competent reviews are slim.

I cannot believe I am the only scientist in the world who is in this situation? I think the reason is that we are now under too much pressure to produce quantities of "stuff" in guise of excellent science. Someone once said to me that he thought it was a good idea to ration papers to 50 for a scientific lifetime. Then each one would be thoughtful, even good.

Another person told me this joke: Fred Sanger was notorious for publishing very few papers. In fact he only published three in his life. What was wrong with the third one?

As a coda to this entry (December 2013) I can add that the paper rejected by Angew was accepted by JACS, I wonder what they think?