Have you ever reviewed a paper and thought "wow, this paper is excellent". It's well written, relevant and obviously crafted with care. Well, know I have.
My question is what do you do with it? Do you find items to nitpick so you can show that you were rigorous or do you simply recommend that the paper proceed to publication?
Thoughts?
Plenty of them- and I say it to the editors.
ReplyDeleteI then nitpick the typos if it's a society journal because they don't have the resources to find and fix those. It's also annoying as an author finding those after publication and wondering why the reviewers didn't alert you to them. It's not about being a difficult bastard. It's about improving the quality of scientific communication.
If it's a major general journal then you can ignore the nits and the professional proof readers will fix 'em