
Shit My Reviewers Say - fforflo
http://shitmyreviewerssay.tumblr.com/
======
capnrefsmmat
There is also, of course, the classic resubmission letter:

[http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Sample.shtml](http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Sample.shtml)

> Enclosed is our latest version of Ms #85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-
> revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the
> entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running
> head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your
> bloodthirsty reviewers

...

> We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally
> recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then
> you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency.
> You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt
> of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to
> thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to
> express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would
> be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next
> manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

~~~
cfontes
That is pure gold!

------
logicrook
For those who like to read these, be sure to read the hilarious "We are sorry
to inform you" by Simone Santini [0]. It's quite hilarious, and illustrates
most common tropes of bad reviewers.

[0]
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/misc/reject.pdf](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/misc/reject.pdf)

~~~
thomasahle
Which are sadly fictional.

I suspect the tumblr blog may be as well, though I don't know the language in
biology reviews.

~~~
logicrook
>Which are sadly fictional.

For context, these are reviews lampooning the style of modern horrible
reviews, applied to some landmark TCS papers.

So I'd say these reviews being authentic would be very sad.

>I suspect the tumblr blog may be as well, though I don't know the language in
biology reviews.

I hope sending some of the most hateful ones would get the reviewer a good
scolding, not a good laugh.

~~~
boingaboinga
They are sadly NOT fictional. We created the blog so people could share their
stories and to encourage people to be more thoughtful in their reviews.

------
Thriptic
I didn't see any mentions of the most common insidious review: "Cite my
unrelated paper or you're not getting published"

~~~
JorgeGT
"The authors seem to have missed the seminal work by Yourstruly et al.
(2015)..."

------
roel_v
"It reads like papers often do when they are written in LaTeX. Reject."

Would be hilarious if it weren't so true.

I had a student once who was 'encouraged to resubmit after having the
manuscript checked for language by a native speaker'. Except that he was
British and just happened to be working at a Spanish university for a local
project. LOL. He's a very clear writer too, certainly top 10% in clarity of
scientific writing. It just shows that it's a crap shoot to get your papers
accepted.

~~~
OneOneOneOne
I'm confused. What's wrong with LaTeX?

~~~
soared
The group of people who use LaTeX and the group of people who are eloquent
writers rarely overlap.

~~~
roel_v
I held off commenting further because I couldn't capture the nuance I was
trying for, but your comment nails it beautifully :)

------
sevensor
I've never seen reviews this ugly in my engineering field, nor written one.
Although I've certainly felt tempted to tell people that their work "fills a
valuable hole in the literature," I try to keep it constructive. For all that,
I've certainly seen reviews that were needlessly pedantic or refused to accept
some entirely reasonable premises. Not to mention the timeless classic, "Your
review of the literature has overlooked Jones and Smith, 2008, Smith, 2010,
and Jones, Smith, Ramakrishnan and Zhang, 2014. Please incorporate citations
to these relevant studies in your revision." Gee. Thanks, Professor Smith.

------
pumblechook
The saddest part is that this kind of 'feedback' isn't out of the ordinary,
but is actually pretty common. I've found in my own reviewer feedback a
striking tendency towards pedanticism that would put Internet grammar nazis to
shame, not to mention completely asinine comments that give no clue as to any
objections the reviewer had ("You aimed for the bare minimum, and missed!").

This is, to me, just one example of the perverse incentives in academia. You
are constantly pushed to publish, yet the gatekeepers who ultimately decide
whether your research sees the light of day rarely give it more than a cursory
glance, and many have no interest in giving helpful feedback to actually, you
know, make the work better.

~~~
jerf
Bikeshedding isn't just for programmers. We just have a jargon term for it.

(And remember, "bikeshedding" isn't just "arguing forever":
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding)
It's about arguing about the things that are easy to understand, to the
exclusion of the probably-more-important, but more difficult, issues.)

------
coreyp_1
I have reviewed more CS papers than I want to remember, and 80% of them are
abysmal in quality. Most of them are papers that undergrads wrote for a class,
that they then hope to publish on the off chance that it will be accepted.
"Off chance" is the important part of that phrase.

Obviously some of the reviewer comments are out of line or show incompetence,
but others are simply reflecting the effort that the authors put into the
paper. It really is that bad at times!

~~~
mikk14
Yeah, it is rather unfair to point your finger against a reviewer's comment
without having a look at the paper too. I've come across papers for which some
of these comments would be even too kind.

This blog is funnier if you're able to mentally classify the posts in four
bins:

\- Clearly clueless reviewer (e.g. "The reported mean of 7.7 is misleading
because it appears that close to half of your participants are scoring below
that mean")

\- Reviewer just trying to keep the tone light in a funny way (e.g. "Unless
the authors performed some clever pagan ritual before euthanizing the animals
I would use ‘killed’ (or ‘euthanized’) instead of ‘sacrificed").

\- Merciless and sarcastic destruction of what was very likely just garbage
anyway (e.g. "This looks like a very early draft").

\- Just a butthurt author's reaction (e.g. " I have read this paper several
times through, and I have nothing to say in its defense.").

------
Kenji
The most shocking one:

 _There is a lot of terminology flung around here that is insufficiently
explained. What exactly is meant, for example, by “false negative” and “false
positive” rates? “median, first quartile, and third quartile”?_

~~~
icegreentea
I really hope that the reviewer was referring to the context that the terms
were being used in. There are some times when exactly what events constitute a
false negative or false positive may be somewhat unclear.

I hope.

------
kardos
Is there any reason to believe any of those entries appeared in an actual
review?

~~~
geofft
Yes, [http://shitmyreviewerssay.tumblr.com/post/138673489984/no-
ne...](http://shitmyreviewerssay.tumblr.com/post/138673489984/no-new-insights-
no-important-question-addressed#notes) provides a source. It's non-public-
access, like entirely too much of science, but I can confirm that my alma
mater's subscription gives me access to an article that has the quote in
question, and starts like this:

 _Our referees, the Editorial Board Members and ad hoc reviewers, are busy,
serious individuals who give selflessly of their precious time to improve
manuscripts submitted to Environmental Microbiology. But, once in a while,
their humour (or admiration) gets the better of them. Here are some quotes
from reviews made over the past year, just in time for the Season of Goodwill
and Merriment._

 _• And here we go with the first 2009 comment: happy new environmental year
dear editor! Regarding the manuscript: it is OK, I hope the flu is not
infecting my review brain._

 _• WOW! You did ‘read it with interest’ in SEVEN MINUTES??!! [Ed.: this is an
author contribution in response to an editorial decision (rejection) made
within 7 min of submission]_

[...]

 _• The writing style is flowery and has an air of Oscar Wilde about it._

and so forth.

~~~
ikeboy
[https://sci-hub.io/10.1111/j.1462-2920.2009.02120.x](https://sci-
hub.io/10.1111/j.1462-2920.2009.02120.x)

------
_nickwhite
My favorite one was:

"You aimed for the bare minimum, and missed!"

~~~
wtetzner
Mine was:

"Why do you have so many tables? Did you go to Ikea?"

------
busyant
My thesis advisor (when speaking of a fellow department member):

 _I use people in our lab to proofread and polish our manuscripts. He uses the
peer-review process._

------
pbnjay
Is this more common in the social sciences? I've never had a reviewer quote
nearly as bad as these (computational biology).

There are plenty of bad / lazy reviewers, but I would think the editor should
be filtering stuff like this if they want to keep the journal reputable. Or
maybe they've written off these article at the outset?

------
mchahn
Maybe I shouldn't admit it but I read quite a few of them thinking these were
reviews of _one_ of his papers. I couldn't believe he was showing these. I
really wanted to read that paper. The thing that threw me off was the "My
Reviewers Said".

------
endymi0n
I somehow had assumed this was about Apple App store reviewers. At least ours
always had hilarious comments and requirements, so maybe it's not too late to
hope for some place to share these stories :)

------
raverbashing
"I found the use of the evolutionary theory problematic. This is a highly
contested theory and the authors did not strongly justify their decision to
use it, nor attend to some of the major flaws of the theory."

Oh FFS

But nothing outside what's "common" in academia (and I mean the other reviews
as well)

~~~
laumars
I sometimes can't tell if people are joking or stupid. The following quote,
for example, _has_ to be a joke:

 _" The reported mean of 7.7 is misleading because it appears that close to
half of your participants are scoring below that mean"_

~~~
chengiz
I dont get why this is a joke. My guess is the paper probably reported the
mean as having some significance in the context of how participants scored,
and the professor is pointing out that this is misleading. In other words,
they should have not reported the mean but the median.

~~~
mikeash
If "close to half" scored below the mean, then the mean and median are
probably very close together.

I think the charitable interpretation would be that some conclusion in the
paper hinges on the value of the mean, but that conclusion is not valid when
you consider that values are more widely distributed, and the reviewer just
stated it poorly.

------
dosaygo
Science's dirty laundry. Aired.

