Scientific integrity matters! Fabricated peer reviewers lead to 60 retractions.

Thanks to The Week‘s report, I was alerted to the 60 retracted articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control. The explanation and list of retracted papers is here. More saucy details can be found here. Kudos to the Editor-in-Chief Ali H. Nayfeh and SAGE for carrying out the investigation and retracting the papers. This […]

How to give feedback to colleagues and students on their writing

One of the perpetual difficulties with providing feedback to others is the tendency to coat the paper in red ink, leaving the author having to plow through all the comments. While not inherently bad in itself (I’m guilty as charged!), it can leave the author thinking that the 30 errors in punctuation exceed the one […]

Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims

This Comment in Nature today by William Sutherland, David Spiegelhalter, and Mark Burgman is meant as a primer for policy makers who need to interpret science, but I would argue that this primer is also useful for scientists who might fall into this trap of overinterpreting or misinterpreting results in their own or others’ studies. […]

How to read and understand a scientific paper

Brian Curran sends along this great blog post about how to read and understand a scientific paper. The subtitle is a guide for nonscientists, but Brian points out that even scientists could benefit from this information. In fact, I would say that many of the questions asked by the author are valuable in constructing a […]

Should peer reviewers be suggested by authors?

A recent editorial by Mounir Fawzi in Middle East Current Psychiatry asks the above question. The paper concludes: Traditionally, peer reviewers are designated by the editor. However, a recent trend, which is followed by the MECPsych, is to give authors an opportunity to suggest reviewers for their manuscripts. A few studies have compared author-suggested reviewers […]

The Golden Rule of Reviewing, applied to grant proposals

A colleague of mine wrote me a while back, I liked your blog entry on the golden rule of reviewing, but I wanted to see if you have thoughts (or know of similar research) regarding the review process for proposals to agencies. It comes to mind because I served on my first [funding agency] panel […]

A note on good research practice: Dooley (2013)

An editorial in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control is entitled “A note on good research practice.” Dooley states: By far the most common issue we editors of this journal are seeing in terms of poor scientific practice in submissions is the failure to appropriately cite the work of others. Sadly, we see numerous […]

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 […]

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 […]

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