Re: Elanodactylus, Andres & Ji 2008

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> if I may ask, who are the "referees"?   (not in this individual case, but 
> are they an organization? a review committee?)

Peer-review: The authors send their manuscript to the editor of the journal 
they want to publish in. If the editor doesn't find it to be (1) off-topic 
for the journal (in which case a better one is often suggested), (2) utter 
trash, or (3) not breathtaking enough for the prestigious journal in 
question (see (1))*, he/she/it/squid sends it to (hopefully) qualified 
colleagues of the authors, and then, unless they don't have time or declare 
themselves unqualified for the field in question, these colleagues -- the 
referees -- read the manuscript and check it** for mistakes, conclusions 
that don't follow from the data, bad explanations and the like. Then they 
send their recommendations -- acceptance provided that a long list of 
modifications is implemented, or rejection -- to the editor, who then sends 
them to the authors, along with this own decision (rejection, or acceptance 
provided that the required changes are made). Then the authors scrupulously 
implement half of the modifications, write an accompanying letter to the 
editor meticulously documenting that half and even more painstakingly 
documenting why the other half consists only of the referees being stupid, 
and send the revised manuscript and the accompanying letter to the editor, 
who then makes the final decision, which is usually acceptance.

To make sure the referees can speak freely, they are offered anonymity, 
though they can choose to sign their reviews***. A few journals even conduct 
double-blind peer-review, which means that the identity of the authors is 
not revealed to the referees either. However, in small disciplines this can 
fail. For example, a coauthor and I had a manuscript rejected by such a 
journal. Of the only two referees, one signed his review, and the other 
didn't. Based on what the latter's review emphasizes and the style of the 
review, we are very, very certain about who that is, and we are also certain 
that he figured out that we were the authors, because we had talked to him 
about the topic of the manuscript half a year earlier. (Don't worry, we have 
meanwhile submitted to another journal, after having revised the manuscript 
based on comments from both reviews.)

* The more widely read a journal, the more submissions it gets, and the 
fewer submissions it accepts.
** For free. Scientific journals never pay authors or referees.
*** And they commonly do, because then they can be mentioned by name in the 
acknowledgments, as opposed to "we thank an anonymous reviewer for 
comments".