The agonizing mismatch between papers and reviewers

Academic journals need good reviewers, but good reviewers are now hard to find despite a dramatically increasing number of “scientists”.

Scientists nowadays are frequently invited to review papers that are not interesting to them. Consequently, they often refuse to review. Who would want to spend his or her precious time reading and reviewing papers entirely irrelevant to their research or general interests?

There are three contributing factors to this mismatch between papers and reviewers. The first is the inexperience of associate editors who do not know which papers to reject outright, and which fellow scientists are familiar with the subject matter of the submission. They rely on the pseudo-AI to pick reviewers, which frequently leads to mismatches between papers and reviewers.

The second contributing factor is the article publication charge (APC). If authors are willing to advertise their junk by paying $2500 per piece, then isn’t it a good idea to let them have their way? In order to create an image of a scientific journal, however, the publisher would still want to send the junk out for review. No scientist could possibly be a well-matched reviewer for a piece of junk.

The third contributing factor is the all-encompassing scope of certain journals. Some have sections but many do not. Even “specialized” sections such as “Immunology”, “Genomics”, and “Ecology and Evolution” are often too broad for an associate editor to claim expertise in, leading to papers sent to the wrong reviewers.

How do we solve these problems? Some have suggested society journals. If we can really go back to the traditional academic societies, this could indeed be a viable solution. Unfortunately, academic societies have taken a one-way journey and cannot find their way back. Many years ago, societies were organized by caring scientists. They were of the members, for the members, and by the members. Members could feel a strong sense of camaraderie. Through society activities, members could find academic jobs, gain academic support or even marry each other. They knew who was good at what, and who had which animal models, bacterial strains or molecular protocols. Naturally, they know who could serve as the editor-in-chief (EIC) of their journals. The EIC knew who could handle the job of associate editors (AEs). AEs knew who could be expert reviewers. Reviewers were eager to review submissions from their fellow members to learn what was going on among members of the society. Which society and which journal of today are like this? We still have academic societies of the same name. Members still pay their dues. But who in the society really cares about you? Perhaps the only time you receive an email addressing you personally is when you have forgotten to renew your membership. Most academic societies are now usurped by power-hungry individuals. The centralization of power corrupts the society officials as well as their journals. In short, society journals can no longer be the solution to avoid the mismatch between papers and reviewers.

Evolutionary biologists might argue that the current journal diversity is all right. Given enough time, natural selection will take care of preserving the good and eliminating the bad. Unfortunately, this selection process is slow and costly, and it is not guaranteed to generate a crop of good journals as long as a steady stream of bad journals finds its way into the population of journals.

Some people or organizations have tried to gain the power to judge and rank the journals. Instead of the natural selection in the previous paragraph, let us do artificial selection which could be much faster. This has been done, and has been done for many years by many people and organizations. The scenario seems to get worse. There are three obvious consequences of this judging and ranking. First, those journals ranked high will charge a ridiculously high APC for advertising junk papers. Second, some business schools are now asking their students to understand this innovative and successful journal-publishing business model. Third, some granting agencies are allocating research grants based on the applicant’s number of publications weighted by journal rankings. Does any of these three consequences contribute to the advancement of science?

Because there is power and money in journal ranking, we are now witnessing a struggle for such power, leading to the creation of the journal Impact Factor, Nature Index, SCImago Journal Rank, and so on. Scientists all seem to accept this practice of reducing the world into this single dimension of ranking scores.

Meanwhile, we still have the problem of mismatch between papers and reviewers.