For those who insist that there is nothing wrong with peer review (as the true believers in global warming do), I invite them to look at my online article here, and explain why it wasn’t good enough for publication. Here are the rules:
1. Be specific. Saying that it has too many errors or uses bad arguments or fails to cite the right sources or is derivative doesn’t count, unless you actually give some examples.
2. Saying that I ought to have included something else (such as a discussion of Plotinus) doesn’t count. I know of articles that were rejected for similar reasons which later on got published, so you need to state why it should be included.
3. Saying that “this represents a possible explanation of the data, but the author didn’t show that it was the explanation” doesn’t count. The physicist Joao Magueijo relates in his book Faster than the Speed of Light that he had a rejection like this once (p. 184). The reason it doesn’t count is that it fails to show that it’s a bad explanation of the data, and if it’s a good explanation, then it deserves to be published.
4. Saying that “this article is all over the place” doesn’t count, unless you can state how it undermines the argument. This is a critical comment that was given to a friend of my wife’s recently, and it doesn’t count because there’s nothing wrong with being all over the place per se. There’s nothing wrong with tying together a lot of loose ends in an article. It makes it exciting, actually. But there’s a good way of doing it, and a bad way of doing it. You need to show that it’s done in a bad way.
Good luck
1. Be specific. Saying that it has too many errors or uses bad arguments or fails to cite the right sources or is derivative doesn’t count, unless you actually give some examples.
2. Saying that I ought to have included something else (such as a discussion of Plotinus) doesn’t count. I know of articles that were rejected for similar reasons which later on got published, so you need to state why it should be included.
3. Saying that “this represents a possible explanation of the data, but the author didn’t show that it was the explanation” doesn’t count. The physicist Joao Magueijo relates in his book Faster than the Speed of Light that he had a rejection like this once (p. 184). The reason it doesn’t count is that it fails to show that it’s a bad explanation of the data, and if it’s a good explanation, then it deserves to be published.
4. Saying that “this article is all over the place” doesn’t count, unless you can state how it undermines the argument. This is a critical comment that was given to a friend of my wife’s recently, and it doesn’t count because there’s nothing wrong with being all over the place per se. There’s nothing wrong with tying together a lot of loose ends in an article. It makes it exciting, actually. But there’s a good way of doing it, and a bad way of doing it. You need to show that it’s done in a bad way.
Good luck
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