Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Despite all the pluses and minuses that a anonymous peer-review system has, there is one major issue that I have with it: bad reviewers. I'm not talking about reviewers who criticized my work, I mean those who are lazy, incompetent, or simply angry at the world, those who have no idea what my work is yet they talk about it with such authority!
I'd like to meet:

  • reviewer who commented on a great video I submitted along with a paper that had no video

  • reviewer who claimed I had no video - yet the other two reviewers found the video helpful (there was indeed a video)

  • reviewer who claimed that TF-IDF scores were not appropriate for text mining

  • reviewer who claimed "no related work as cited or discussed" for a paper with a page of related work and ~40 references. Given, it was not in a separate section titled "Related work" which, apparently, made it impossible to notice

  • reviewer who noted that my draft needed "some wordsmithing" and continued on with: "I belief...", "no future more section", "in the introduction was stated...", "explore and asses similarity", "an consensus", "requirements were not disused", " identified cores seems to be..." in a broken English. Really?



Is this the best we can be?