The Golden Rule of Reviewing

The Golden Rule If you submit N papers per year, you should perform 2N to 3N per year. It is only the right thing to do. If you impose a submission onto the peer-reviewing system, then you owe it to the system to perform two or three reviews to make up for it. The peer-reviewing […]

New American Meteorological Society Author’s Resource Center

The American Meteorological Society has redesigned its web site. One of the important changes is a much more clear presentation of the journals and the requirements for new submissions. By reading these pages more carefully, authors can avoid unnecessary delays after submission.

Should quality peer reviewers be recognized by the journal?

I came across this web post and thought this Editor’s idea for recognizing the top 8% of reviewers was a pretty good idea. I admit it might be some work to implement, but the Editor had a formula to do it, reducing the work involved. I am a big fan of this idea for several […]

Is it OK to mentor someone who is writing a peer review?

Brian Curran asks: I would like to hear your thoughts regarding the review process and young (or inexperienced) reviewers. I’ve reviewed just a handful of manuscripts, so it’s safe to say I’m inexperienced. Having a mentor or two guiding us relatively inexperienced reviewers through the process might prove to be beneficial and could serve to […]

An example of why hyphens are necessary

The following is an excerpt from an email sent to staff at the University of Manchester. As part of the University’s commitment to creating change in gender equality across the University we are running a half day unconscious bias training session focussed on recruitment and promotion. The following is how it should have been punctuated […]

Reviewer wants “media-friendly schematic”

This comment appeared in a review of a paper for which I am serving as Editor. “I suggest creating a media-friendly schematic showing the basic conclusions of how ….” Given all the recent publicity about …, I believe this paper will attract media interest, and a schematic like this will be useful for explaining the […]

Can I resubmit a rejected manuscript to the same journal?

It depends. Most of the time, rejected manuscripts can be resubmitted to the same American Meteorological Society (AMS) journal if the concerns of the reviewers are addressed in a response to the reviewers in your cover letter. Usually, the decision letter will say something like this: “Although your manuscript is being rejected, I invite you […]

Dead salmon have meaningful brain activity, or how to get scientists to stop using outdated methods

We’ve all seen in our science bad approaches or terminology that get established and are difficult to kill. Chuck Doswell has his pet peeves, I’ve battled against my share: conditional symmetric instability to explain banded precipitation and moisture flux convergence as a diagnostic for severe storms forecasting. Bennett et al. were awarded the 2012 Ig […]

An example of an excellent figure

I had been showing this figure to several students recently about an effective way to plot a lot of spatial data without the figure looking cluttered. I think this is one excellent way to do it. The plots are all ordered around the perimeter of the map, yet the points take you to the locations […]