Darren New wrote:
> It saddens me to realize I believe that people would do this
> maliciously, rather than just being stubborn or close-minded. Sigh.

	Ugh. Not that rare, but depends on the discipline, and subdiscipline. I
highly suspect it is common in physics and engineering, and the more
grant money that is involved, the more common the behavior. My math
friend was surprised to hear these stories, and I suspect it's because
math faculty rarely get grants, and aren't expected to.***

	This is just based on anecdotal observations, though.

	Here's a common one that happened to me and that same colleague
independently. Submit a paper with the title along the lines of
"Investigating the effects of A on device X". The referee responds
saying the paper is poor because it doesn't investigate the effects of B
on X. We then have to send the editor a response saying "The paper is a
study of A on X, not of B on X" at which point he finds another referee.

	It hurt me in particular because the second referee then found another
(slightly more intelligent) complaint, and we weren't allowed to respond
because the journal had a 2 strike rule. I always wondered if the first
referee did it intentionally just so that we'd waste one opportunity to
respond.

	Then even more common (although not with my papers). Referee responds
with "author did not address phenomenon B", when the author clearly did
on page n. It's quite clear from some of the comments that the referee
did not read the paper properly.

	But kind of pointless worrying about it. I'm not in a position to make
change - don't know if I'll ever be. My take is that the academic world
w.r.t. journals is mostly OK and egalitarian, but experience has shown
that if people want to abuse it, there's little in the infrastructure to
prevent it, or even to detect it when it has happened.

	The exceptions are usually quite remarkable: Either politics is
involved (as in domestic or international - not science), or the person
at fault was trying to get away with really wild claims.

	Also, to be realistic, the fault lies not just with the individuals who
play these games, but at the institutional levels. Take away the
motives, and I think a lot of these will go away.

*** One thing I like about math papers. The rule is that author names
are listed in alphabetical order. So none of those "first author" issues.

-- 
OK, so what's the speed of dark?


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