When studying for a 100% research degree, your academic life is always at the mercy of reviewers. Since there is no course work and exams, the number and the quality of the publications that emanate from your work are very important for you to get your degree.
When you submit a paper to either a conference or a journal, it gets reviewed by several experts in that particular research area. The comments and recommendations of these esteemed reviewers guide either the editors or the program committee on whether to accept or reject a paper.
This procedure vests so much power in the hands of the reviewer.A reviewer can either bring you down or lift you up. Therefore, there is a need for reviewers to polite and honest as they do their work.Some reviewer recommendations and comments can be very bad. In September 2005, I submitted my first ever paper to a very eminent journal (name withheld for obvious reasons). The review process was pretty fast such that by early December of the same year, I received the review results. The paper was rejected. The editors further told me that competition was stiff. They had received 55 manuscripts but they had to accept only 15 of them. Being my maiden journal paper, I knew that it had some weaknesses and that its chances to get accepted were not very high. When I heard that it was rejected, I did not care that much simply because I already had two conference papers accepted by that time and I was well on course to finish my MScEng studies in good time. But one of the reviewers destroyed my December 2005 and January 2006.
The paper was reviewed by two people. Both of them rejected it. The first reviewer was honest and very polite in his language. This reviewer did a great work. He pointed out the weaknesses in my paper and made great comments concerning the required improvements. He also pointed out some positive aspects of my paper. These comments helped me to refine the paper such that it was later accepted for the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, the premier event in Computational Intelligence. The second reviewer’s comments were awful. His language was very bad. He did not pick out any positive thing out of my paper. He blew my weaknesses out of proportion. He portrayed me as a person who cannot do any meaningful research. His attacks were too personal. To make matters worse, he printed his full name on the review form.Whether this was a mistake or by design, I do not know up to now. Reviewers are supposed to hide their identity. Sometimes, I think that this guy “dismantled” me like that simply because he was seeing my name and that of my supervisor for the first time in the Computational Intelligence arena. Though my supervisor is an experienced researcher, his major research area is not Computational Intelligence, but Computer Engineering. If our names were well known in this field, the situation would have been different. I also think that this esteemed reviewer might as well have been looking down upon us as authors from Africa. This gave him a license to “kill” us. He probably might have been asking himself this question. Can anything good come from Africa? Although he damaged my Christmas and New Year, I do not have any grudge against him because, as a Christian, all things, whether bad or good, work together for my own good. But in order to avoid cases like the one that I went through, it would be great if double blind reviews can be used for technical papers. Double blind reviews entail that both the reviewer and the author must not know each other. This will help to ensure fairness. The “Can anything good come from Africa?” syndrome will have no place. Reviews where only the identity of the reviewer is hidden from the author are known as single blind reviews.
UPDATE: I recently stumbled on some excellent guidelines for reviewing journal papers on Professor Leigh Thompson’s site. These guidelines are well detailed and very clear. I don’t have to list them here. Just follow the link to Professor Thompson’s site. But please make sure that you come back here because I still have a number of great posts which you have not yet read 
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25 users commented in " Conference and journal paper reviewers must be honest and polite "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackClement, that happens and it happens even at times when you have vested alot of effort and you are trying to build your career. If you go through the studies on the performances of peer review committees, you will be amazed at how much it has been criticized not only for rejecting good papres but also accepting awful research works. Remember the chinese Professor Hwang who authored the paper that he was the first sceintist to clone 30 human embryos and harvest stem cells from them. He published it in a journal called science after undergoing peer review. He was further discovered that his research was fabricated and his papers were withdrawn. Peer reviews have destroyed careers of upcoming academics and let alone those that come from countries that they think they do not do much research like Africa. Peer reviewers have also been accused of stealing research ideas and publishing them as theirs whilst rejecting your paper with the very same findings. Unfortunately we cannot do anything apart from accepting whatever they tell us just as you did. good luck next time you want to publish your paper.
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Well said! Can’t add more. We simply need equality and fairness.
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Clement you have written a nice piece
Your post is very informative & I completely agree with you.
Thank for the information
Doing Gr8 work keep it up
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@Henry: Great to see you comment on this article.From your comments, I am really touched by this statement:
“Peer reviewers have also been accused of stealing research ideas and publishing them as theirs whilst rejecting your paper with the very same findings.”
This is my first time to hear about such tactics.This is very bad.
@Bennett:We really need fairness and equality
@Web Design: Thanks for your compliment.Keep coming back
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hi
this is great information
thanks a lot
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Great article and thanks for the link to Professor Thompson’s site that was a great supplementary resource.
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Don’t worry about it Clement. The guy was likely relishing any bit of power he was granted because he’s used to not having any. Karma is a bitch, they’ll learn it soon enough.
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Thanks for the great article and links. Just what I have been looking for.
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It’s a shame that people have to be like that sometimes. Sometimes in the academic world you have these crazy un-polite people
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With the academic world, like any other market/world, you will always can be victim of burocracy and stupid politics. That’s the way some things are…
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For a reviewer, the art of constructive criticism goes a long way.
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Definitely sounds a bit like academic snobbery to me.
Although you should also consider that he thought he was being helpful
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A agree with Faux, constructive criticism is the way forward and treating others how you yourself would want to be treated. The second reviewer sounds like a generally unhappy person, put it down to them and not you and follow the constructive comments.
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The 2nd examiner could well have just been having a bad day and taken it out on you.
To be fair there should have to be a review of reviewers work so they know they have to keep to standards or loose reputation too.
They wield far too much power
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Couldn’t have been said any better!
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Why is everyone scared of a little criticism
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Clement, it is complicate mate, some people simply can’t take criticism well.
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The reviewing process is always going to be irratic. Reviewers have their opinions that may differ from other reviewers, it is very much in the lap of the Gods.
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I think that being both equal and fair in any review is the key that is so hard to find…Keep up the good work!
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I can only agree that it is way to hard to find good, fair and objective reviewers.
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For a reviewer, the art of constructive criticism goes a long way.
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The guidelines post you linked to on Professor Thompson’s site is solid gold. Thanks for that link and a great post!
Cheers
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 7th, 2009 at 10:55 am
@Tangy: I like them as well
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For a reviewer, the art of constructive criticism goes a long way.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:50 pm
You are right, Jack.
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