Adversarial Reviewing

If you are (or were) an academic, you know you've experienced adversarial reviews. (The link points to a paper that shows how to prosperously referee papers adversarially.)

I'd like to dedicate this entry to the adversarial referees that have been a part of my life. (Among others, I'm looking at you, PLoS Computational Biology referee who (incorrectly!) complained about the fact that we used a method that didn't work on weighted networks on a paper in which we only study unweighted networks. (Sadly, the Editors actually considered this report to be legitimate even when presented with a published mathematical proof to the contrary and a pointer to a very prominent line in which we state rather clearly that all of the networks under study are unweighted. Se la vie.)

(Tip of the cap to Aaron Clauset.)