Peer review rules!

I vaguely remember, in my youth, a paper about a "Wire-istor" being accepted ;-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

It does reveal that the journal doesn't actually do any kind of peer-review.

I've never paid a page charge to any journal for any of the stuff I've published, so I'm probably not a target for that particular brand of spam.

There are real journals where the peer-review process doesn't work too well. I've had four comments published in Review of Scientific Instruments - in 1972, 1996, 204 and 2011 - which could all be paraphrased as "your refereeing is rubbish".

I submitted a couple of other comments along the same lines that didn't get published, which may reflect the fact that the editor didn't like being implicitly castigated for picking incompetent referees.

This was published after both Jim and I had been born, but before we learne d to read.

In the version of the story I heard, the author had been forbidden to enlis t, because his work on The Analyst was deemed to be essential war work. Whe n nobody had reacted to his spoof paper after a year, he was reputed to hav e successfully argued that nobody actually read the journal, and had conseq uently been allowed to enlist. The (British) Royal Society of Chemistry adv ances a more plausible story of office politics.

Squishy subjects are, well, squishy. ;)

(Yikes)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

So you doubt that drinking a litre of brandy containing levorotatory ice would lead to headaches? ;)

It's science, you know.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'm a bit more sceptical about the 12.6% gallium in the aluminium alloy freezer trays for the ice.

It may be science as you know it - you did work for IBM at one point - but it looks more like a spoof to me.

That's more along the lines of super-blatantly obvious, but IEEE has been p ublishing trash Proceedings for decades. These are usually Defense related and if you read some of this puerile and inane junk, it's really hard to be lieve the "author" is even an adult, the content is no better than your exa mple.

There's more going on than meets the eye. Medicine is an art, not a science, and doctors are trained to practice the art, not to do the science on which it is based.

In particular, doctors are trained to make up their minds fast (before the patient gets worse/drops dead) and not to worry about their decisions after they've made them - having your mistakes kill people is a potent source of self-doubt, depression and suicide, and if you don't think about your decisions you are less likely to kill yourself, no matter how badly the case turned out.

Some doctors reject this part of their training and go on to do good science, and get lots of favourable publicity for their work. Other doctors envy this and insist on doing their own ill-designed experiments and sometimes succeed in publishing their unreliable results and meaningless conclusions.

Colin Douglas - a Scottish doctor who writes rather well - has written about this "The Greatest Breakthrough since Lunchtime" ISBN-10:

Since envy and incompetence generate a lot more experimental programs than are generated by interesting problems, the medical literature is full of rubbish.