Friday, December 24, 2010

Random Thoughts

One has to wonder why a leading journal should allow a paper to pass through its QC phase and onto a lengthy review process if the editor is going to then decide, on the basis of a personal reading of said paper, and demonstrating remarkably poor comprehension skills, to reject said paper as gibberish. Well, at least this provides more entertainment than the common practice of rejecting papers without forwarding them to reviewers. One wonders why such editors bother to write such lengthy email rejections, carefully outlining their total misunderstanding of every clear sentence in the paper. Surely they could not have obtained such a high rank in The Patriarchy without perfecting the skill of masking their ignorance, at least to themselves. Anyway, one must carry on.

3 comments:

  1. Yeah, it can be frustrating. Sometimes I wonder how many reviewers moonlight as anonymous trolls online. My listing on NASA ads/abs is getting longer, so progress can be made.

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  2. In this case, the person in question pointed out that there was no way the theoretical number XXX could have anything to do with astrophysical number YYY (even though he had in fact checked that XXX and YYY were identical) because the number YYY was a random value resulting from random classical physical processes.

    My papers used to get rejected without anyone even reading them. Then they would be rejected because they were grossly misinterpreted. Now they are read with a flawed logic that would make the Mad Hatter look like Godel.

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  3. The hierarchy.
    The on-shell characters.
    the meeting place of algebraic and p-adic numbers
    or the changing Plancks constant with a big 'magnetic body' wavefunction.

    You choose.

    ReplyDelete

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