X-Message-Number: 23469
From: "John de Rivaz" <>
References: <>
Subject: Re: Referees
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 17:20:50 -0000

> From: Thomas Donaldson <>
> Subject: Paul Pagnato's funny story, and Ben Best

<del>
> referees are too often allowed to make quite false
> statements about the content of a paper (clearly false if they've
> actually read it), ask that their own papers be cited (whether or not
> they played any role in the work reported in a paper), and generally
> fail to answer any complaints by an author. So peer-reviewed evaluation
> doesn't come up to what it should be, in any case.

Good grief! No wonder there are so many peculiar papers that do make it to
press and so much guff around these days.

As cryonics depends so much on the advancement of science and technology,
surely qualified scientist amongst us should be campaigning for something to
be done about this to ensure that referees throughly understand the subject
of papers they are admitting to publications of academic standing.

> Ultimately if you
> wonder about the accuracy of a paper, you may have to repeat the
> experiments or closely read the proofs and think about their meaning.

Shouldn't referees at least do the latter? If the steps between lines of
mathematics aren't easy to follow, or variables or operators not defined,
then send the article back and get more smaller steps inserted. I suppose
there is a problem that the referee may think he ought to know what they are
and is ashamed to admit he doesn't, but this can be circumvented by saying
"some readers may not know what a __ is" or something like that.

-- 
Sincerely, John de Rivaz:  http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including
Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley
Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy,  Nomad .. and
more

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