Thursday, November 20, 2008

Here's a review ...

OK, here's my favorite recent review, in response to a MEG paper by a post-doc in my lab, Mary Howard:

"The results presented clearly support the proposed model. Procedure and ... analysis ... technically correct and include some sophisticated details. Moreover, the ms. is well written and exceptionally well illustrated."

Result: outright rejection, with no possibility to 'reject the rejection' (my favorite activity). The other reviewer thought the idea was "timely and important," but not enough so, I guess :-(

Ugh! In that case, I'd rather have the brutal rejections like "your entire career is worthless; every piece of research you have touched is wrong; you're hurting the field; incoherent" and so on. 

3 comments:

Jonas said...

Indeed. I guess we will have to launch a blog entirely dedicated to this huge subgenre of passive-aggressive reviewing.

The Vlad said...

There must have been a "but" (presumably not a "butt", however) somewhere, no?

David Poeppel said...

of course, The Vlad, there is *always* a but (and a butt)