Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Academic Publishing

The 2015 paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton that introduced us to rising "deaths of despair" in America, probably the most important piece of social science published in the past decade, was rejected by the first three journals they submitted it to. This even though Deaton had already been nominated for the Nobel Prize. In fact they got so frustrated with what they saw as the irrelevant objections of reviewers that they ended up invoking his status as a member of the American Academy of Science to get it published in the Academy's journal without peer review.

1 comment:

szopeno said...

My boss used to say that "if you are frustrated by reviewers who didn't get your paper and have idiotic remarks it means it's your fault because you have not writtern clear enough", but I stopped to believe that when one reviewer recommended reject of one of my papers, as a main reason citing my unprofessional moving all the figures to the end of the paper, and leaving only "fig.1 evenetually here" - when this particular journal _demanded_ exactly that in requirements.