Peer Review

Dealing with Paper Rejections

For some reason, the topic of reviewing and getting papers rejected came up several times in conversations at VIS recently. Getting your work rejected and learning to deal with rejection is part of life as an academic, and it’s worthwhile to think about the process a bit. Read more…

Peer Review, Part 5: The Importance of Gatekeepers

The purpose of peer review is to separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the brilliant from the clinically insane – you get the picture. But why? Why filter and not just let anybody publish whatever they want? Read more…

Peer Review, Part 4: Good Reasons for Bad Papers

As a reviewer, you might sometimes ask yourself why people write so many bad papers. And why they bother submitting them. I certainly do. But where do they come from? Who submits bad papers? And why? It may come as a surprise, but there are good reasons to submit bad papers for review. Read more…

Peer Review, Part 3: A Taxonomy of Bad Papers

Reviewing is great when you get a good paper where you can make some suggestions to make it even better, and everybody’s happy. Bad papers are much less fun, but they are also much more common. Here are some examples I’ve seen and that I keep seeing. Read more…

Peer Review, Part 2: How It Works

Peer review is one of the central pillars of academic publishing. But how does it actually work? What is blind review, and what is it good for? This part will answer those questions, and then tell you how to be a good reviewer yourself. Read more…

Peer Review, Part 1: Quilt Plots

What is peer review? How does it work? And is it really as flawed as people claim it is? In this little series, I will talk about all that, and then end up arguing that peer review does, in fact, work - at least in visualization. But first an example where it didn’t. Read more…