I recently reviewed a paper, for a prestigious journal. Paper was clearly from the academic mill. It was horrible. They had a small experimental engine, and they wrote 10 papers about it. Results were all normalized and relative, key test conditions not even mentioned, all described in general terms… and I couldn’t even be sure if the authors were real (korean authors, names are all Park, Kim and Lee). I hate where we arrived in scientific publishing.
To be fair, scientific publishing has been terrible for years, a deeply flawed system at multiple levels.
Maybe this is the push it needs to reevaluate itself into something better.
And to be even fairer, scientific reviewing hasn’t been better. Back in my PhD days, I got a paper rejected from a prestigious conference for being too simple and too complex from two different reviewers. The reviewer that argue “too simple” also gave a an example of a task that couldn’t be achieved which was clearly achievable.
Startups on the other hand have people pursuing ideas that have been proven to not work. The better starups mostly just sell old innovations that do work.
I recently reviewed a paper, for a prestigious journal. Paper was clearly from the academic mill. It was horrible. They had a small experimental engine, and they wrote 10 papers about it. Results were all normalized and relative, key test conditions not even mentioned, all described in general terms… and I couldn’t even be sure if the authors were real (korean authors, names are all Park, Kim and Lee). I hate where we arrived in scientific publishing.
To be fair, scientific publishing has been terrible for years, a deeply flawed system at multiple levels. Maybe this is the push it needs to reevaluate itself into something better.
And to be even fairer, scientific reviewing hasn’t been better. Back in my PhD days, I got a paper rejected from a prestigious conference for being too simple and too complex from two different reviewers. The reviewer that argue “too simple” also gave a an example of a task that couldn’t be achieved which was clearly achievable.
Goes without saying, I’m not in academia anymore.
Startups on the other hand have people pursuing ideas that have been proven to not work. The better starups mostly just sell old innovations that do work.
Do you usually get to see the names of the authors you are reviewing papers of in a prestigious journal?
I try to avoid reviews, but the editor is a close friend of mine and i’m an expert of the topic. The manuscript was only missing the date