From the issue dated June 2, 2000

Reviews of Journal Manuscripts: Nasty, Petty, Arrogant By AMY HACKNEY BLACKWELL No one condones road rage. Some drivers, anonymous and secure behind the wheels of their vehicles, allow their base instincts to rule their actions. They tailgate, intimidate, and hurl insults at anyone foolish enough to drive too close to them. Most people find such behavior unacceptable and believe it must be stopped. But when the world of academic publishing permits similar abuses, it goes unchecked. Eager scholars send their precious manuscripts off to journals in the hope that maybe, just maybe, this time they will be published. Months later, their papers come back with rejection letters from editors and accompanying anonymous reviews. Those reviews are supposed to help the writer improve his or her work, but many reviews do not offer constructive criticism. Some are simply critical. Others are downright abusive. What gives reviewers the right to be nasty? Do they think that because they are anonymous, they are exempt from the rules of common courtesy? That's the same mentality that lets drivers think that they can act as they please behind the wheel of a car. The vehicle makes a driver big and strong, and more or less invisible; he can bully others as much as he likes with no consequences. It doesn't hurt that his victims are only nameless faces, partially obscured by windshields: It's easier to attack someone you don't know. Evidently many professors feel the same way, believing that their safe position as anonymous reviewer allows them to be as mean and petty as they choose. Here is an authentic example of an anonymous reader's vitriol. Two reviewers read the same manuscript, which a friend of mine submitted to a journal. The first reader recommended that the author revise the piece in certain ways and resubmit it, noting: "On the whole, the submission reveals a careful and thoughtful consideration of [the questions] and provides the reader with much interesting and useful information." The second reader, however, concluded: "How [the author] can claim [the author's thesis] is beyond my comprehension. ... It is insufficient merely to cobble together various, sometimes unrelated, aspects of the historical record, and claim that this constitutes an argument." Given that the second reader also recommended that the author revise and resubmit the manuscript, those comments seem gratuitously malicious. Another friend of mine, a graduate student in classics at Harvard University, recently had an article accepted for publication. But the accompanying readers' reports were so harsh that she wonders when she will have the courage to submit more of her work to academic journals. Trying to publish an article does not have to be as awful as being the victim of road rage. Law reviews, competing ferociously for material, flatter and cajole writers to get them to submit and publish their work. The editors of commercial publications are generally quite courteous to writers, even when rejecting submissions. That may be partly due to the many famous authors who write for those publications, but the editors are usually polite even to unknown writers. Academic journals are in a league of their own when it comes to making the publishing process difficult and demoralizing. The irony is that academics put far more effort into their work than other writers. Experts on the law throw articles together in a matter of weeks and expect the editorial staffs of law reviews to smooth out the rough edges. Writers for popular magazines may work hard on pieces, but they can expect to be paid for their time if they market their work skillfully. Academics, though, might research a topic for years before they are ready to submit an article about it for publication. Then they wait months for someone to read their work. Chances are that the journal will reject the piece. So the author goes through more research and writing to revise it, sends it off to another journal, and waits again. What a waste! Fine works of scholarship languish on their authors' computers. Fine scholars wonder if the reviewers are right to call them incompetent fools, and fret about their dwindling chances for tenure. The rationale behind the system of anonymous reviews is sound: Disguising the identity of reviewers allows them to give their opinions honestly, without fear of reprisals from disgruntled writers. But in practice, the feedback is often comparable to being sandblasted and then run over by a bulldozer. Why are reviewers so mean? Perhaps it is because supplicants at the altar of academic publishing are the only nameless, faceless, and entirely defenseless victims available to those exalted professors. They can't insult their students -- their universities would not let them. They can't insult their colleagues, at least not much -- the colleagues could retaliate. But they can be as rude as they want to potential authors, who don't know who they are and can't fight back. Although some reviewers may act as they do to keep potential competitors down, it seems that most of the cause is simple nastiness. Some scholars defend the practice by claiming that academic publishing has always been this way. It's true that academics have a long history of flaying one another in reviews. In 1926, for example, A.E. Housman, introducing his critical edition of the Roman poet Lucan, had this to say of a previous edition: "Hardly a page of it can be read without anger and disgust. [The editor] was a born blunderer, marked cross from the womb and perverse; and he had not the shrewdness or modesty to suspect that others saw clearer than he did, nor the prudence and decency to acquaint himself with what he might have learnt from those whom he preferred to contradict. ... The width and variety of his ignorance are wonderful; it embraces mythology, palaeography, prosody, and astronomy, and he cannot keep it to himself." Tradition or not, the practice is not sustainable. The publishers of academic journals are facing a crisis. University libraries find the spiraling cost of journal subscriptions too high compared to the interest in them. Young scholars have to publish, but they detest the unpleasantness involved in submitting their work to a print journal, and many of them find it impossible to place their articles in those publications. As a result, they are turning to electronic journals like Stoa (http://www.stoa.org), whose aims are to make academic writing available to the general public, and to provide a place for scholars to have their work reviewed by their peers. In the nascent world of electronic publication, where it costs about the same to publish 20 excellent pieces as it does to publish two, the dominant ethos seems to be one of shared enthusiasm, rather than sneering arrogance. Journal editors would do well to consider that their product will be less and less in demand in the coming years, and that their anonymous-review process will only diminish their popularity further. They should let reviewers know that gratuitous insults will not be tolerated any longer. Nastiness and bullying are not acceptable behavior, either by drivers or reviewers. Amy Hackney Blackwell is an attorney and writer. http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B10 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article