Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Coffee!! Is peer review the wheel of life or the Wheel of Fortune?

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Bit of both. Neuroskeptic offers:

In the spirit of the 9 Circles of Scientific Hell, and inspired by the evidence showing that scientific peer reviewers agree only slightly more often than they would by chance, here’s a handy tool for randomly generating your review.

How’s this one:

4. Cite Me, Me, Me!: The problem with this paper is that it doesn’t reference the right previous work… yours. Unless the authors change it to cite everything you’ve written in the past 10 years, they can get lost. If they do, the paper will be immediately accepted – to reject it would harm your citation count.

Some readers may wish to try it on their work in progress or on this week’s grocery flyer.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

More peer review stories:

Everyone hates the blogosphere and loves peer review, right, but …

Early coffee: Traction, retraction, and self-plagiarism (when scientists retread what they should retire)

Peer review: have we run out of polish for the iron rice bowls?

Comments
Hello All, Since this is a coffee break, I don't feel so bad about being off topic. I was just reading an article over at the NY Times about the "new" Advanced Placement tests that are rolling out in the next few years: Rethinking Advanced Placement On the second page is a summary about the new biology AP tests: For biology, the change means paring down the entire field to four big ideas. The first is a simple statement that evolution “drives the diversity and unity of life.” The others emphasize the systematic nature of all living things: that they use energy and molecular building blocks to grow; respond to information essential to life processes; and interact in complex ways. Under each of these thoughts, a 61-page course framework lays out the most crucial knowledge students need to absorb. (My emphasis.) Ugh.EndoplasmicMessenger
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