CCL: ChemPhysChem: warning

To extend on what Robert Molt said, I may be another village idiot, as I have never identified any of the reviewers to my papers either. Really, I couldn't care less about the identity of a reviewer, all I care is the quality of the review. Once it happened that one of my papers was rejected because of "poor quality" and "missing to cite" such-and-such "important paper". The "important paper" in question was actually part of the list of references! I understood that the reviewer had done a shoddy work, and I resubmitted to another journal. The paper got accepted by a journal with a better impact factor (FWIW) than the first one who rejected it.

On other occasions, reviews that led to rejection have actually been helpful in improving the quality of the paper. Perhaps in these cases I would like to know the identity of the reviewers, so I could thank them personally. In such cases, I have always expressed my appreciation to the editor.

Going back to the original message, I do think that taking two months to find out that a paper is not within the scope of a journal is a little too long, after all, it is the editor who defines the scope of the journal. The editor should be able to see if a given paper fits the journal right away. It happened to me once: I got a paper rejected by the editor the following day after my submission, stating that it was not within the scope of the journal.

But I also think that the current system could be improved by double-blinding. When I was a grad student I saw it happen: a professor decided to grade the final term papers in a graduate level class only by looking at the contents, identifying the papers by codes, not the students's names (the code-name key was in sealed envelopes provided by each student, I think). Not only the professor, but a lot of people got surprised at the resulting grades, as some "great" students failed and some "so-and-so" students got top grades.


Just my two cents.

Victor


2014-05-04 18:25 GMT-05:00 Robert Molt r.molt.chemical.physics[-]gmail.com <owner-chemistry(!)ccl.net>:
I find it absurd how many people are claiming how "obvious" it is to identify reviewers/authors of papers. Empirically, this is not true. The people claiming how obvious this is apparently have forgotten what it is like to be a newer scientist in the field, and not have decades of experience to have met "everyone" and know the writing styles of "everyone" while they are just a graduate student writing papers.

Perhaps I am just the village idiot, but I've not been able to identify the reviewers of my 7 papers.

Regardless, the "obviousness" of identities does not have any logical bearing on the question proposed: why show the names of paper's authors? If the anonymity of the reviewers is precious (reasonable), why is the anonymity of the submitters any less precious?

Of course I take any paper written by Dr. Bartlett or Dr. Cramer more seriously...they are great scientists. Of course I will be biased in their favor, whereas the exact same publication from some loser named Robert Molt would require a greater hurdle.
Dr. Robert Molt Jr., Ph.D.
 r.molt.chemical.physics,,gmail.com
 Nigel Richards Research Group
 Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology
 Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
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 Indianapolis, IN 46202
On 5/4/14 1:14 PM, Jack Miller jmiller * brocku.ca wrote:
I am a retired chemist and VP Research, still tying up loose end of 40+ years of lab results. My wife is Âretired dramatic arts Prof, Some of her papers too over a year to get the reviews back, which is also the case is disciplines such as Math and Computer Science.Â

My wife used to get manuscripts to review with the author's name suppressed - it being a relatively small field, and in almost all cases she could identify the author, and for reviews of her own papers, books and grant applications she was almost always sure who the anonymous referees were.Â

In chemistry I could very often Âidentify the referees for my nearly 200 papers. If the authors were anonymous they would still be identifiable by the references or the instrumentation used or as one of my mentors used say he could identify the referee who was still making the same grammar mistakes made in their thesis.

What we have works - don't reinvent the wheel.



Prof. Jack Miller
Special Advisor on Buildings & Space,
Emeritus Professor of Chemistry
Brock University.

Sent from my iPad

On May 4, 2014, at 4:33 AM, "Sebastian Kozuch seb.kozuch*_*gmail.com" <owner-chemistry^-^ccl.net> wrote:

I vote for the "triple-blind" review: Nobody knows the reviewers, the authors, or the editors!

On 5/3/2014 3:11 PM, Marcel Swart marcel.swart*o*icrea.cat wrote:
I just wanted to add that highly high-profile journals like Angewandte,
Nature Chemistry, have Editors that are *not* active in research,
but I would doubt seriously that this would make them incompetent.

Like Michel said, two months is nothing, it is not unusual to have a
period of between 2 months and one year between first submission
and final acceptance. It reminds me of an Editorial Iâve recently read,
about how to write a paper and how to deal with the reviewing process.

Good luck with the paper!

Marcel

On 2014-05-03, at 09:13, Demetra Dimetrodon dpfiz- -hotmail.com <owner-chemistry---ccl.net> wrote:

Just be warned that sending your manuscript to ChemPhysChem could resultÂ
in a huge delay in dissemination of your scientific results - in my case twoÂ
months. Then again, the editor of ChemPhysChem does not appear to beÂ
active in research at all, something which is completely unheard of for a high-
profile journal.

----------
Demetra Dimetrodon


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Catalunya (Spain)

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