Tuesday, October 21, 2008

on reviewing

I have some advice based on recent experience:

Reviewers:

If you add a cloud of question marks on top of each other in the margin, the reviewee gets a good idea of the intensity of your opinion about the paragraph it’s floating near. What the reviewee doesn’t get is what provoked the intense opinion and what to do about it.

Reviewees:

Make sure that you really go over the first couple pages of your manuscript, because if you’ve got dumb typos in the beginning, the reviewer will get a poor impression of the overall manuscript, regardless of the fact that your intro is just “big picture” BS and your actual scientific data is terrific. If a reviewer has a foot stomping, red pen-throwing pet peeve, try not to include it in the first two paragraphs.

1 comment:

A Life Long Scholar said...

From my own experiance, I can add:

If you are the only native-English speaker in the list of authors, make certain that the senior author gives it back to you again for one last correction before submitting it to the journal...