When you think you’ve seen it all

The background

I am a mid-career “professional scientist”. I hold a tenured job at an institute of higher education, my daily duties for the last decade have included teaching and research activities in some part, on most working days of the year. I have been on the treadmill of acquiring my “research” chops for about decade or so, before then.

On this road of recognition in being and becoming an accepted member of the professional scientific enterprise, one learns to learn a lot about something (which is usually the focus of one’s dissertation). The learning is boot-strapped by some formal (classroom-like) setting, but pretty soon it becomes about leaning into the real world of research — whether that be done on computers, using pen-and-paper, in a lab with pipettes and test-tubes, or with lasers.

The stage

But, what in the world does leaning into the real-world of research really mean? As graduate students and beyond, professional scientists (can, or mostly try to) find their information from published journal articles.

“Oh, fine!, I knew that”, you say — and many folk probably do. Many too probably know that these journal articles are published by a refereed process that is called peer-review. Most professional scientists adore this process, because when idealized, it epitomizes the essence of “kicking the tires and peeking under the hood” in the process of doing science.

For those who don’t, peer-review means a review of your work by your peers (yes — we like to say what we mean and mean what we say quite literally as professional scientists!) There are many types of peer-reviews — each journal choosing its own version of it , some perhaps better and others perhaps not so much, and all of them influenced by their histories. And, if I were writing an academic article here, I’d probably cite a few great articles (perhaps on Medium itself) on all of this. But, that’s not my intent.

The plot

Suffice it to say, that along one’s journey as a professional scientist then, one also starts to become a “support structure” of sorts, by not just being a consumer of scientific information, but now by playing an active role as an evaluator for any newly produced scientific information. In other words, you get peer-reviewed and you perform peer-reviews. This is a part of the “service you provide” in the support of scientific enterprise.

In all forms, this process is refereed and follows a set of rules set by the field, journal, etc. In this process, as a professional scientist, you play one of the following roles. (A) you can be the author of the work (these are obviously the chaps whose names appear under their articles when published).

(B) you are an (associate) editor — a match referee or sorts, if you will. As an AE you contribute your time in maintaining the scientific publication enterprise for a journal. Your role is to direct the work presented by a professional scientist, such as (A), who has had a bright idea and wants to publish it. You were recruited as editor because you are a subject-matter-expert with sufficient career experience, so you can channel A’s submission to a set of 2–4, hard-headed, peer-reviewers.

(C) you are one of the peer-reviewers. Your job is to review the work — to help the scientific community build on good work and shun poor ones. As peer reviewer, you review the submission by A, as a report you send to B. Usually (C) gets do this anonymously — so that they are protected from A, as the argument goes.

In this dance, each manuscript that comes in for peer-review ultimately lands up as a published article (yay!) or a rejected one (back to the drawing board). When the system works fairly, robustly researched work gets published and weakly-researched work does not. But, we’re all human and as I’ve said before, there are other masters to serve in pursuit of high-quality science, and sometimes things can get contested.

The WTF…

Overall as professional scientists, we all come to accept that sometimes excellent papers may get rejected many times before breaking through. While, given the volume, rate, and scale of science production, many a manuscript that gets published may not have deserved to be in print. We accept the contentious nature of the modern scientific enterprise, whatever role we’re playing in the peer-review process. And, I’ve been playing this game for many years.

Which brings me to the moment of what stopped me in my tracks. Today, on LinkedIn I came across a post that I thought was too incredulous a statement and the post claimed that it was quoting the statement verbatim from a published journal article (I have to cite this here, as I did not believe the post was true). Here’s the statement:

As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35–47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.

The post and the thread on LinkedIn apportioned blame to all actors in the peer-review process.

But, I’m still somewhat confused by how to interpret this. If there was ever a clear sign to examine our value systems and how we to think of peer-reviews, this would have to be on top of the list. When requests for irrelevant citations make it into published work, it’s a stark call for soul-searching: can we abandon values that allowed us to establish the scientific method and still “make progress”? Should we? This may be a good time to rethink how to uphold the integrity of this enterprise.