Criticism and Published Material

Rivkin · 1st June 2006, 06:13 PM

Nice, well all members of academia have their favorite stories about reviewing process.

In my experience most of "impression negative" reviews usually contain the following, very often all in one set of reviews:

a. The paper is wrong. Since usually reviewer have not really read it, such review usually accomponied by some general statements like the "the method is unsound".
b. No one gives a damn about it. "not of interest to the general community", "used to be a hot subject, but in the past years...". Again there is really no reliable indicator to measure the public's interest in unpublished article, so its a safe bet for the reviewer.
c. It was already done. Again, the reviewer did not really read it, so he will either quote some unrelated article or will just refer you to "works of leading experts in the field".

Now our community is different. First of all there are very few books on our subject and even fewer of them are good. Second our science here, in my opinion, is intrinsically subjective. We usually can not use mathematics and produce "the probability of this sword to be from XVI century is 1 minuls less than 1 in a million". Most of our arguments would not be usable in court. For examples one just has to remember Oakeshott's debucle of accepted positions on origins/dating of certain swords. While we can form an accepted consensus, I doubt we can ever speak of proving something. To top all this, we don't have a truly professional, specialized journal with a strict peer review policy. Most of the articles we use are published in all kinds of historical journals; also they are not being reviewed by specialists in arms in armour, but by specialists in history. Most of us are amateurs (well I am).

The results are there for display.

1st June 2006, 06:13 PM	#1
Rivkin Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 655	Nice, well all members of academia have their favorite stories about reviewing process. In my experience most of "impression negative" reviews usually contain the following, very often all in one set of reviews: a. The paper is wrong. Since usually reviewer have not really read it, such review usually accomponied by some general statements like the "the method is unsound". b. No one gives a damn about it. "not of interest to the general community", "used to be a hot subject, but in the past years...". Again there is really no reliable indicator to measure the public's interest in unpublished article, so its a safe bet for the reviewer. c. It was already done. Again, the reviewer did not really read it, so he will either quote some unrelated article or will just refer you to "works of leading experts in the field". Now our community is different. First of all there are very few books on our subject and even fewer of them are good. Second our science here, in my opinion, is intrinsically subjective. We usually can not use mathematics and produce "the probability of this sword to be from XVI century is 1 minuls less than 1 in a million". Most of our arguments would not be usable in court. For examples one just has to remember Oakeshott's debucle of accepted positions on origins/dating of certain swords. While we can form an accepted consensus, I doubt we can ever speak of proving something. To top all this, we don't have a truly professional, specialized journal with a strict peer review policy. Most of the articles we use are published in all kinds of historical journals; also they are not being reviewed by specialists in arms in armour, but by specialists in history. Most of us are amateurs (well I am). The results are there for display.