We all love our own data and suffer when incompetent, biased, and hostile peer reviewers (our colleagues = us) don´t recognize the novelty and importance of the work we have invested our resources and hopes. Sometimes it happens that reviewers actually are right and their criticism is (almost) fully warranted, but unfortunately more than often we face comments that genuinely are not justified. Here are the ones I find most annoying. Certainly hope I never get ever caught from using them myself.
- I did not have time to read it but after the third reminder by the editor I spit out my criticism based on the abstract to show that I’m critical
- They don’t cite my work so here is my punishment,
- I don’t have time to read this, but authors are not from the field, so I don’t like it
- Although the data is solid, the biological phenomenon is too complex and authors should simplify it to one protein-one amino acid mechanism
- Nothing wrong with the data but I would have written it differently so I don’t like it
- This would change the dogma and thus I don’t believe it
- There is one crappy paper published with these two words together so it’s not novel
- You did not cure any patient so the importance of this novel discovery is questionable.
- It’s not p53/EGFR/MYC/RAS/CDK so it cannot be important
- This is how it was in 80’s and their results don´t fit to that model, so their results are wrong
- Although the revision experiments invalidated my original point I will stick to my opinion.
- Although the revision experiments invalidated my original points, I came up with dozen new points
- As I know to ask for this, it has to be done
Featured image retrieved from: Science and Ink with credit to Nick Kim |