Friday, December 09, 2005

Amusing fake response to referee report

From the Gazebo's blog comes this amusing but fake response to a series of referee reports.

Naturally, I have plenty of my own refereeing stories, mostly from the author's perspective (like when they complained about our not ever mentioning something, to which our response was on the order of 'see equation (1); this is what the whole paper is about'---in this example, all the referee's comments suggested he/she never read the paper, so we added a couple new calculations to the paper rather than resubmit the same thing and specifically requested a different referee and explained why we felt the referee wasn't in good faith; the editor agreed with us, by the way) but with one from the referee's perspective. The one time I refereed something with incident, the authors decided to completely ignore my comments and yell at me and indicate how I obviously knew nothing about [fill in a couple things]. In making those arguments however, they made multiple serious mistakes in their "explanations" in their cover letter of why I was wrong, so I included some very specific page numbers (including in one of the main book sources they were citing) in my second response to help them see the light. Thankfully, the paper ended up in PRB rather than PRL, and I can likely be "blamed" for that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

the second story: i have nothing to say but: over achiving techers. -jing

Mason said...

Well, I had to look up the page numbers. I already owned the books in question and knew relevant stuff was discussed therein (because that's how I knew to bring it up in the first place).