Editorial pubs.acs.org/OPRD
In Praise of the Peer Review Process and Reviewers/Referees first page. Needless to say, this was returned to the author with some “polite suggestions” for improvement. However, others are rejected after comprehensive review because the data presented in the paper do not support the conclusions reached. Some are rejected because some portion of the work has previously appeared in the literature, sometimes by the same authors. With industrial papers, this is quite a rare occasion; usually in industry the only prior publication is a patent, and we do accept papers which set out in detail work described in a patent, regarding a patent as a legal rather than a scientific document. In conclusion, peer review works extremely well in improving the quality of papers published1 as well as rejecting lowerquality articles. I would like to express my thanks to all those chemists and engineers who give up their valuable time to evaluate papers and provide excellent feedback to authors. OPR&D is still short of reviewers from industry, since many have retired or moved on to new positions after industry reorganization (and we have lost touch). New volunteers are most welcomeplease contact me at oprd@scientificupdate. co.uk if you think you can review one or two papers per year.
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ccasionally I hear the statement from some academics and industrialists that it would be much better if authors of papers just posted them online on their own Web site without any peer review so that the information would be free to anyone. The corollary is that they do not need journals, and peer review is not necessary. The assumption is that all authors would write manuscripts which were free from errors and omissions and that authors would reference adequately the prior art and would give due credit to others in the field. The assumption is also that articles would be written in good intelligible English and be easy to read by scientists and engineers in the field. It would also be expected that the scientific arguments and conclusions were correct and that the data would support the conclusions reached. So why do they think that editors reject papers? The peer review process may not be ideal, but it is an excellent system for weeding out poor quality and substandard R&D, for spotting plagiarism (including self-plagiarism and duplication of results), and for finding all sorts of errors. Most authors in Organic Process Research & Development (OPR&D) recognize the amount of time and effort put in by reviewers and they comment to me that their paper has been significantly improved by the peer-review process in general and by the critical comments from the reviewer (and often the editor too!). In the last week, I have seen examples of accepted papers which would have been quite difficult to read without the changes made after peer review. Examples include: (1) The numbering system in schemes was incompatible with what was written in the text. (2) Schemes were drawn with incorrect bond angles and therefore were difficult to decipher. (3) Key background references to the literature or to current work in other laboratories were omitted. (4) References were duplicated. (5) References were inadequately described, so that readers would not be able to find the paper discussed. (6) The numbering system in the text did not correlate with the numbers in the references at the end of the paper. (7) Design of experiments (DoE) work was inadequately described so that the conclusions could not be verified from the data supplied. (8) DoE figures were transferred directly from the software package with axes incorrectly labeled so that the reader could not tell which factors were being studied. (9) Incorrect conclusions were drawn from the data. (10) Experimental work was omitted from the manuscript. OPR&D rejects from 30 to 40% of papers each year. Some of these are rejected with only editorial review, and this may be because the work is outside the scope of the journal. Others are sent back to the authors because, whilst the science is adequate, the quality of writing is poor and the manuscripts are littered with errors. Proof reading by authors seems to have become worse over the years, and recently, in one manuscript I found more than 50 typographical and syntactical errors just on the © 2013 American Chemical Society
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Trevor Laird, Editor OPR&D AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) The value of the peer review process has been highlighted in the following two articles: http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/peerreview-usa.html and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6110/ 1065.abstract.
Published: February 18, 2013 317
dx.doi.org/10.1021/op400029f | Org. Process Res. Dev. 2013, 17, 317−317
