Professional Documents
Culture Documents
in 1 2 3 Easy Steps
Prof. Rick Trebino
Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Physics
Atlanta, GA 30332
rick.trebino@physics.gatech.edu
www.physics.gatech.edu/frog
Ha ha! You didn’t really believe that, did you? Here’s the actual
sequence of events:
5. Note that almost all such Comments were two to three pages
long, like the other articles in the journal.
7. Receive no response.
9. Receive no response.
18. Receive a response from the journal, stating that your Comment
is 2.39 pages long. Unfortunately, Comments can be no more
than 1.00 pages long, so your Comment cannot be considered
until it is shortened to less than 1.00 pages long.
19. Take a look at the journal again, and note that the title, author
list, author addresses, submission date, database codes,
abstract, references, and other administrative text occupy about
half a page, leaving only half a page for actual commenting in
your Comment.
23. Receive a response from the journal, stating that your Comment
is 1.07 pages long. Unfortunately, Comments can be no more
than 1.00 pages long, so your Comment cannot be considered
until it is shortened to less than 1.00 pages long.
24. Write to the journal that, in view of the fact that your Comment
is only ever so slightly long, and that it takes quite a while to
resubmit it on the journal’s confusing and dysfunctional web site,
perhaps it could be sent out for review as is and shortened
slightly to 1.00 pages later.
26. Receive a response from the journal, stating that your Comment
is 1.07 pages long. Unfortunately, Comments can be no more
than 1.00 pages long, so your Comment cannot be considered
until it is shortened to less than 1.00 pages long.
29. Wait three months, during which time, answer questions from
numerous competitors regarding the fraudulence of your life’s
work, why you perpetrated such a scam on the scientific
community, and how you got away with it for so long.
33. Notice that Reviewer #2 hates your Comment for taking issue
with such a phenomenal paper, which finally debunked such
terrible work as yours, and insists that your Comment not be
published under any circumstances.
34. Notice that Reviewer #1 doesn’t like it either, but considers that
its short length may have prevented him from understanding it.
35. Also receive the topical editor’s response, pointing out that no
decision can be made at this time, but also kindly suggesting
that you consider expanding your Comment to three pages and
resubmitting it along with your responses to the reviews.
36. Expand your Comment back to three pages, replacing adjectives,
adverbs, figures, equations, explanations, and corrections of
author errors you had had to remove earlier to meet the 1.00-
page limit. And, in an attempt to enlighten Reviewers #1 and
#2, include a separate extended response to their reviews.
38. Wait three months, during which time, receive condolences from
numerous colleagues regarding the fraudulence of your life’s
work and how sorry they are about it having been debunked.
40. Read the latest issue of the journal, which includes another
detailed three-page Comment, almost bursting with colorful and
superfluous adjectives and adverbs, some as many as twenty
letters long.
44. Note further that Reviewer #2 now adds that your Comment
should under no circumstances be published until you obtain the
important details from the authors that you confessed in your
response to the reviewers you were not able to obtain and are
not ever going to.
45. Realize that Reviewer #2’s final criticism inevitably dooms your
Comment to oblivion until such time as the authors provide you
with the important details, your best estimate for which is never.
46. Notice, however, that Reviewer #1 now sees your point and
now strongly recommends publication of your Comment. He
also strongly recommends that your Comment remain three
pages long, so that other readers can actually understand what
it is that you’re saying.
50. Receive the editor’s decision that your Comment could perhaps
now be published. Unfortunately, Comments can be no more
than 1.00 pages long, so your Comment cannot be considered
further until it is shortened to less than 1.00 pages long.
51. Point out to the editor that most Comments in his journal are
two to three pages long. Furthermore, it was the editor himself
who suggested lengthening it to three pages in the first place.
And Reviewer #1 strongly recommended leaving it that long.
54. Obtain the latest issue of the journal and enjoy reading yet
another nice lengthy Comment, this one swimming in such
extravagant grammatical constructions as dependent clauses.
55. Receive the editor’s response, apologizing that, unfortunately,
Comments can be no more than 1.00 pages long, so your
Comment cannot be considered further until it is shortened to
less than 1.00 pages long.
62. Receive a response from the journal, stating that your Comment
is 1.09 pages long. Unfortunately, Comments can be no more
than 1.00 pages long, so your Comment cannot be considered
further until it is shortened to less than 1.00 pages long.
70. Receive a response from the senior editor that you cannot thank
Reviewer #1 for obtaining the missing details and confirming
your results, as this would give the appearance that the journal
was biased in your favor in the Comment review process.
71. Assure the senior editor that, if anyone even considered asking
about this, you would immediately and emphatically confirm
under oath, on a stack of Newton’s Principia Mathematica’s, and
under penalty of torture and death that, in this matter, the
journal was most definitely not biased in your favor in any way,
shape, or form in the current geological epoch or any other and
in this universe or any other, whether real or imagined.
72. Receive a response from the senior editor that you cannot thank
Reviewer #1 for obtaining the missing details and confirming
your results, as this would give the appearance that the journal
was biased in your favor in the Comment review process.
80. Receive a response from the senior editor that, while your
Comment is now short enough and properly formatted, over the
many modifications and shortenings that have occurred, its tone
has become somewhat harsh. For example, a sentence that
originally read, “The authors appear to have perhaps
accidentally utilized an array size that was somewhat
disproportionate for the corresponding and relevant waveform
complexity,” has evolved into: “The authors are wrong.”
83. Wonder whether your Comment has finally been sent to the
authors for their Reply, or instead was lost, trashed, or sent
back to the reviewers for further review and possible rejection.
85. Take them up on their offer, but learn that they expect you to
pay for drinks, which, regrettably, you can’t because sales at
the small company you formed to sell devices based on your
work have fallen to essentially zero.
86. Learn from one of your grad students that a potential employer
asked her, “Hasn’t your work recently been discredited?”
89. Learn from Reviewer #1 that he has not received the authors’
Reply for review, or any other correspondence from the journal
in the several months since he submitted his review.
90. Realize that you had stopped carefully reading the journal, and,
as a result, had missed the “Erratum” published by the authors
on the paper in question six months earlier, shortly after you
submitted your short-lived three-page version of the Comment.
92. Feel old, as you can remember the days when Errata involved
correcting old errors and not introducing new ones.
93. Note also that, in their “Erratum,” the authors have actually
responded to some highly specific criticisms of their errors you
mentioned in the three-page version of your Comment—
criticisms that you had removed when shortening it to meet the
journal’s strict 1.00-page limit. Criticisms the authors couldn’t
possibly have known about in view of the journal’s strict
confidentiality rules for submitted papers, unless this version of
your Comment was somehow leaked to them...
94. Realize that, with this “Erratum,” the authors have effectively
already published their “Reply” to your Comment.
95. Note also that, while your Comment has been kicking around for
close to a year, its publication date nowhere in sight, the
authors’ “Erratum” was published in a mere nineteen days.
97. Note that this is consistent with the fact that, on both their
paper and “Erratum,” one of the authors’ names is misspelled.
This is consistent with the fact that, by now, you’ve already
spent approximately 100 times as much time correcting their
errors than they spent making them.
98. Realize that you must now modify your Comment to also include
a discussion of the “Erratum.” Ask the editor if you can do this.
99. Receive a response from the editor that, after much discussion
among the journal editors, it has been decided that, yes, you
can do this.
101. Realize that your Comment is now several lines longer than the
do-or-die 1.00-page limit.
103. Also, take advantage of the fact that, in some literary circles,
sentence fragments are considered acceptable. Decide that,
indeed, verbs highly over-rated.
108. Receive a phone call from the senior editor, who takes
advantage of this opportunity. He has suddenly remembered
that your Comment’s tone is a bit harsh. He is concerned that
the authors, who appear to be highly motivated and quite crafty,
will complain loudly and aggressively about the obviously
preferential treatment your Comment is clearly receiving from
the journal and make his life miserable. He objects to nearly
every sentence in your Comment, in each case, insisting on a
considerably longer sentence. He insists that you not say that
the authors are “wrong” and suggests instead “perhaps
mistaken.” He also insists on replacing the word “so” with the
unforgivably long “therefore.”
109. Realize that, if you accede to his demands, your Comment will
be an unacceptable 1.2 pages long, dooming your Comment to
oblivion.
110. Also learn from the senior editor that you cannot thank
Reviewer #1 even for simply “confirming your calculations,” as
this would also reveal the obvious preferential treatment your
Comment has clearly received from the journal.
112. Learn from the senior editor that another reason that you
cannot thank Reviewer #1 is that there is no record of Reviewer
#1 actually having confirmed your calculations. Apparently, the
paper on which it was printed has, over the eons, turned to dust.
113. Send a copy of the email from the journal containing Reviewer
#1’s review to the senior editor.
114. Also, offer to put the senior editor in touch with Reviewer #1, in
case all records of Reviewer #1’s identity have also been lost.
115. Also, learn from the senior editor that he admits no expertise in
your field, but that he will nevertheless not allow you to say in
your Comment that the approach that you proved twenty years
earlier is “fundamentally impossible” is “fundamentally
impossible.” Instead, you must say that it “has not been shown
to be possible.”
120. In preparation for the final phase of the Comment process, write
to the editor asking if you will be able to see the Reply to your
Comment and make minor modifications in view of it, as allowed
by most journals.
122. Finally receive notice from the editor that the authors’ official
Reply to your Comment has been reviewed and processed.
Unfortunately, it was not found suitable for publication and so
was rejected. And because, for maximum reader enjoyment, it
is the policy of this journal that a Comment cannot be published
without a Reply, your Comment cannot be published. This
decision is final.
123. Be advised that the journal thanks you for submitting your
Comment, and you should feel free to submit a paper on a
different subject in the future, as this journal features the most
rapid publication of any journal in this field.
Addendum
Within hours of its posting on the internet, this story went “viral”
and found its way to many web sites and blogs, including those of
Harvard economist, Greg Mankiw, and the founder of Craigslist, Craig
Newmark. It has been read by close to 150,000 people on one site
alone (www.scribd.com). And it has elicited thousands of interesting
and generally constructive comments (which, fortunately, are a lot
easier to publish on the internet than mine was in the journal…). So I
thought that I should respond to some of them, which I will do here.
Many people commented that I should’ve done more than simply
submitting a Comment to a clearly hostile journal to get the word out.
Of course, I also did all the things that people suggested. My grad
student and I gave talks on the subject; we published paragraphs and
figures in papers in other journals when we could reasonably fit them
in; we emailed and talked it up among other colleagues; and I placed
a longer version of the Comment on my Georgia Tech web site and my
company web site fairly quickly.
However, in doing so, we risked having the Comment rejected as
“not new.” Recall that journals also think of themselves (probably
inappropriately) as breaking-news sources and so will reject a paper if
it’s been covered in the press or some other source, even if that
source is not another journal. The journal in question is actually the
correct place for the Comment; to not publish a Comment there or to
allow it to be rejected is tantamount to accepting the incorrect result.
And, unfortunately, most other journals in my field don't accept
Comments. Finally, I’ve published scores of papers in the very journal
in question (and won a paper-of-the-year award from them a few
years ago and more recently won another shortly after this story
appeared), so I think no one would have imagined that it’d be hostile.
And I still don’t believe it was hostile to me personally; it was hostile
to the Comment.
Others commented that only a naive idiot (yeah, you can say what
you want on the internet…) would submit a Comment when so few
have been published in the past, so I should’ve expected trouble. But
I should point out that the vast majority of scientific papers are mainly
correct, and the few mistakes that do leak through are minor and so
don’t merit Comments, which could also explain the paucity of
Comments. The paper on which I commented was so egregiously and
completely wrong that it clearly merited a Comment, so it should've
been very easy for the journal to realize this, especially when its
chosen anonymous reviewer confirmed my team's results fairly early
on.
That my story has propagated so far and is eliciting so much
discussion seems to me to imply that we're apparently all a bit naïve
on the subject, and it’s great that many who aren't are weighing in to
help enlighten the rest of us.
Others wondered why I didn’t take advantage of the senior editor’s
boss earlier. I did. I called and emailed him several times. He’s
actually a friend of mine, but he claimed to have had limited ability to
interfere (perhaps he wanted to distance himself from a potentially
contentious thing like a Comment, fearing that I might do something
crazy, like write an article on my experience and put it on the
internet...).
A few suggested that the story is so far-fetched that I must have
made it up. I sympathize with this thought; the events are indeed
quite unbelievable! But I’m just not creative enough to have made
this up, and rest assured that I did not make it up. Also, many have
commented on the internet that they’ve had similar experiences. I
wrote it up in an only semi-successful attempt to retain my sanity
during the process (among other stress-related symptoms, I still have
a pain in the neck that I developed a few months into the process).
And, even though I’ve not named names, it’s not too difficult to find
the relevant papers (just take a look at the references in the Comment
itself, or go to the scribd site, which has summaries of the science
involved and the Comment). Also, I’ve saved all my correspondence
in the matter, which I’m happy to share with anyone who is in a
position to do something about this problem and who is willing to
invest a couple of days reading it all.
Many suggested suing the authors and the journal. I considered
this and even talked to an attorney. But I’ve never sued anyone
before, and the attorney assured me that any lawsuit is a major hassle.
Also, my scientific colleagues are highly non-litigious, so many would,
as a result, likely avoid me, fearing that I might also sue them. Plus,
if I sued the journal, I’d be suing my own non-profit professional
society, whose funds come from my colleagues’, my friends’, and my
own dues. And it sponsors conferences I attend and enjoy. Paying me
damages would likely cause the cancellation of a conference or two. I
am still considering suing the authors and their organization (they
certainly deserve to be sued; someone did a search and found that
they’ve done the same thing to others).
Overall, in my opinion, most internet commenters had it exactly
right; the system is set up to publish a Comment to correct erroneous
work that leaks into the literature, and it really should be able to do so,
so it’s a shame that it has such a difficult time actually doing so.