Daniel Lemire's blog

, 1 min read

How peer review is supposed to help you!

Malicious authors know how to get past peer review without effort:

  • Pretend to have run extensive experiments supporting your theories. When the experiments contradict you or are merely difficult to explain, clean them out conveniently. Nobody will try to reproduce your experiments on the short run.
  • Do not think through the deep and complicated issues: reviewers only have a few days at the most to review your papers anyhow!
  • Pick your problems and experiments so as to make the problem as elegant as possible. Do not bother yourself with nasty (but important) details: they will merely get in the way of getting your paper accepted.

Peer review is meant to help you generate better results. Listen to the reviewers. Peers are (potentially nasty and ill-tempered) advisors. Convince yourself that your work is good, even under some scrutiny.

Remember: your research program is more than the sum of your papers. Many useless researchers wrote many more papers (and got larger grants) than Shannon or Feynman. Don’t write papers whose only virtue is that they may eventually get past peer review. It is a depressing goal.