[See part 1, part 2 and part 3 from a few months ago.] I’m horrified, but not as surprised as I would like to be, by a new paper (Welch 2012) which analyses peer-reviewer recommendations for eight prestigious journals in the field of economics.

As things stand there are two principal types of written communication in science: papers and blog posts. We’ve discussed the relative merits of formally published papers and more informal publications such as blog-posts a couple of times, but perhaps never really dug into what the differences are between them. Matt and I have been discussing this offline, and at one point Matt suggested that authorial intent is one of the key differences.

Last Friday I got an email from Dr Stuart Taylor, Commercial Director of the Royal Society, wanting to set up a phone-call to talk about the issue I raised about the editorial procedure on Biology Letters . I got back to him with my Skype handle, but without fixing a date or time. Then on Monday this week I was approached by Lucas Brouwers, a journalist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Folks, In response to our recent post about reject-when-you-mean-revise and submission-date massaging at Royal Society journals, Susie Maidment tweeted: Since then I have heard from several other sources — including Stuart Taylor, Head of Publishing and Commercial Director of the Royal Society — that these practices are widespread. Can anyone confirm this from their own experience? It needs to be stamped out wherever it happens.

Just a quick one for Matt Butler, who in a comment on the orignal postwrote: I just looked as well, and here’s what I saw: {.size-full .wp-image-6939 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-6939” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6939” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/10/06/biology-letters-does-trumpet-its-submission-to-acceptance-time/biology-letters/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/biology-letters.png” orig-size=“480,425”

If you haven’t already read the last post, please go do so before reading this one.

I’ve recently written about my increasing disillusionment with the traditional pre-publication peer-review process [post 1, post 2, post 3]. By coincidence, it was in between writing the second and third in that series of posts that I had another negative peer-review experience — this time from the other side of the fence — which has left me even more ambivalent about the way we do things.

Let me begin with a digression. (Hey, we may as well start as we mean to go on.) Citations in scientific writing are used for two very different reasons, but because the two cases have the same form we often confuse them.

Last time I argued that traditional pre-publication peer-review isn’t necessarily worth the heavy burden it imposes. I guess no-one who’s been involved in the review process — as an author, editor or reviewer — will deny that it imposes significant costs, both in the time of all the participants, and in the delay in getting new work to press. Where I expected more pushback was in the claim that the benefits are not great.

[Note: this post is by Mike. Matt hasn’t seen it, may not agree with it, and would probably have advised me not to post it if I’d asked him.] The magic is going out of my love-affair with peer-review.