如何避免审稿人的大斧Word文档下载推荐.docx

1、请用Ctrl+C复制后贴给好友。How to Avoid The Reviewers Axe: One Editors View 转载 注：原文作者Stephen D. Senturia，转载自JMEMS Editorial, June 2003Editors Note: Stephen D. Senturia has been a member of the Board of Editors for IEEE/ASME JMEMS since the journals first issue in 1992 and was named a Senior Editor in 1998. Thi

2、s experience, coupled with his service from 1985-95 as the Solid-State Sensors Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, adds up to 17 years in an editors chair. Over the years, Steve has kept mental notes on the myriad problems that authors have with reviewers and has been inspired to c

3、ompile the following “advice to the author” about ways to keep reviewers satisfied; hence, to keep them at bay. ABSTRACT Based on his many years of experience, a JMEMS editor provides guidelines for authors that will, if followed, greatly reduce the risk of a devastatingly negative result from the r

4、eview process. The premise is that there are certain things that rightfully anger reviewers, and, once angered, the reviewers become both negative and aggressive in their judgments hence, the imagery of “the reviewers axe” and how to avoid it. INTRODUCTION Since this is a personal commentary, I will

5、 use the first person, something that no proper writer of scientific discourse would ever do. As an author of many technical papers over my 35-year academic career, I have too often felt the anxiety of opening that envelope from the journal editor, which, from its bulk, obviously contains my preciou

6、s manuscript, returned to me for either minor revision, massive rework, or the ultimate wound assignment to the manuscriptal trashbin. Now, having spent some 17 years on the opposite side of the table, my cumulative experience with many manuscripts and almost equally many unhappy authors is that the

7、 primary reason reviewers attack certain manuscripts is that those manuscripts are genuinely flawed. Many, if not most authors wont agree, at least not at first. So I thought it would be helpful to authors to set down some practical suggestions for preventing the reviewers axe from giving the author

8、s a whack. A scientific manuscript is intended to communicate new information and to teach new material to a willing audience. Many authors forget this simple fact; rather, they view the writing process as an opportunity to bolster their own egos and impress the reader, even discomfit the reader som

9、ewhat, either with too much material or too little. Since there are many different styles of paper, I will select a hypothetical example of an experimental paper in which the authors make a minor advance in an established experimental method, and they then use this method to obtain some new results

10、that are to be compared with a model that is also a minor modification of already published work. Along the way, some unusual behavior is observed that the modified model cannot explain. The authors believe that they understand why this behavior is observed, and wish to propose their explanation, ev

11、en though they have not yet done the definitive experiments to prove their hypothesis.SENTURIAS GUIDELINES How should the authors think about organizing and writing this paper? I propose a set of simple guidelines. The names are listed below, followed by some discussion in which each guideline is ex

12、plored in depth:? （Almost） Nothing is New. Rely on the Believability Index. Watch for Gambling Words. Dont Be a Longfellow. Dont Pull Rabbits Out of Hats. Mine All the Gold Remember: Reviewers are Inarticulate and Authors are （somewhat） Paranoid Violation of one or more of the principles explained u

13、nder each guideline risks getting the reviewer angry （with cause）, and once that happens, the axe comes out and swings with purpose. I dont believe that a manuscript has ever been written that cannot be improved, but an angry reviewer finds many more faults than a reviewer who believes that the auth

14、or has basically done a highly professional job, both of research and of writing. Its just plain dumb to aggravate a reviewer. Every authors goal should be to keep the reviewers axe in its sheath. （Almost） Nothing is New Everyone knows that there is nothing new under the sun. Everyone, that is, exce

15、pt an ambitious author who believes that his or her work is unique. While there are a few truly unique and amazing results published once in a while, most of our work is built on the work of others. It is every authors obligation to establish clearly the context in which the new work belongs, both b

16、y a brief introduction and by the citation of appropriate references （which the author should have read, not simply copied from someone elses reference list）. If an author doesnt know any relevant references, then he or she should get on-line and find them they are there! I used to tell my graduate

17、students: “First, figure out what you have done. Then, go to the library and find it!” They might not find exactly what they themselves had done, but they would find all kinds of relevant material that needed to be sifted to find the critical subset that was so relevant that it demanded citation. Al

18、ong the way, there are some additional principles to follow: If you have a manuscript on a closely related topic that is either buried in some conference digest, is still in review, or has already been accepted by a journal but is not yet in print, it is your obligation both to notify the editor and

19、 reviewers of the existence of this paper and provide pre-publication copies to aid the review process. This is perhaps the single most significant source of reviewer venom the discovery of a related paper that the authors have kept hidden from the reviewers. And the venom is real the reviewer feels

20、 that the author is trying to trick the review process, so out comes the axe. If a reference is relevant enough to your work to cite it, then it is also relevant to your results. Many authors provide a cosmetic list of references at the beginning of a paper but never return to compare their allegedl

21、y new results with the contents of the cited papers. This infuriates reviewers, and rightly so. Scientific advances are the result of confirmation and comparison among many independent investigators. When results are presented without any comparisons to prior work, reviewers get angry, and they get

22、out the axe. Rely on the Believability Index. The essence of scientific advance is that results are believable because they have been repeated and checked by independent investigators. By definition then, a truly new result is not scientifically confirmed until it has been repeated by others. This l

23、eads me to the concept of a Believability Index. In creating an outline for this hypothetical experimental paper with modest advances both in experimental method and in the model and with some surprising results that come out, the author should think about the believability of the various constituen

24、ts of the outline. Clearly, the existence of a cited public record of previously published work （regardless of whether that work is or is not correct） is highly believable. So are the basic laws of physics, well-established theories and models, and widely practiced experimental procedures. All of th

25、ese have a high believability. In contrast, any new result has a lower believability. If a result hasnt been confirmed by others, it is not “established” and therefore is intrinsically less believable than a peer-confirmed result. At the lowest level of believability is an authors speculation as to

26、the reason for any new result. （Said another way, “Talk is cheap.”） But if a new experimental result is sufficiently documented in a manuscript, reviewers may accept it, even if they dont agree with the speculative explanation for the new behavior. All of this leads to the principle of the Believabi

27、lity Index, which automatically assigns an order to the contents of the paper: Write the paper in order of decreasing believability. The beauty of this approach should be self-evident. If a paper is written in order of decreasing believability, each reader will be led to agree with what is stated at

28、 the beginning, because it has high believability, but later might balk at accepting either a new experimental result （if improperly explained） or a speculative explanation. A properly ordered paper will have NO critical high-believability content after the introduction of the first moderate- or low

29、-believability material. And the reader who, at some point along the way, fails to agree with the author, has the benefit of knowing all of the high-believability material at the point of disagreement and thus can focus the disagreement on the right issues. Sample-preparation methods, which are assu

30、med to be completely factual reports of what an author did, should have a high believability and thus belong early in a paper. A common mistake of authors is to surprise readers relatively late in a paper, well beyond the first low-believability point, with a report of some new sample preparations a

31、nd the like. That kind of writing makes for choppy papers that are hard to read, and hard-to-read papers irritate reviewers. If you are reporting a new experimental procedure, in order to keep its believability high, you should trace by example how you go from raw data to reduced data to extracted m

32、easured result, and mention such things as calibration （if not based on a commercial instrument specification）, the number of samples, and the relation between the error bars on the graph and your data （is it full range? probable error of the mean? what?）. Confirmation that the new method gives an expected answer in a well-known case is an obvious believability-builder. This helps to improve the believability of your new experimental results, which was presumabl