Donna Yates, archaeologist in the criminology department at University of Glasgow, was recently subjected to an unususal situation. Her academic work was up for blind peer reviews and was met with a bizarre review. This review suggested that the author has misrepresented the works of Donna Yates, who happened to be the author of the very same article that was being reviewed.
Donna tweeted, “The worst piece of peer review I got was a double blind reviewer who told me that I totally misrepresented the past work of Donna Yates (me) and needed to cite her (me) more.”
She further said, “I mean thanks for shilling for me, anonymous person, but I think I have a pretty solid handle on what Donna Yates (me) was presenting in those past papers.”
Her response to that peer review was to do a ‘@LegoAcademics’ about it, where she tweeted, “Blind Peer Review: Dr Grey’s paper “evidences an inadequate understanding of the important work of Dr Grey.””
Interstingly, earlier this year the former British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith had called for pre-publication peer review to be abolished.
He wrote, “Peer review is supposed to be the quality assurance system for science, weeding out the scientifically unreliable and reassuring readers of journals that they can trust what they are reading. In reality, however, it is ineffective, largely a lottery, anti-innovatory, slow, expensive, wasteful of scientific time, inefficient, easily abused, prone to bias, unable to detect fraud and irrelevant.”
