Comment by bee_rider
19 hours ago
I’ve only published a few papers, but this interview sounds extremely unusual to me (I mean, it is clearly a special thing that the editor is doing, which is fine). I wouldn’t do something unethical, but if I had and the editor asked me for an interview like this, I’d know I’d probably been caught.
Why is it unusual: it sounds extremely time-consuming.
As to how worrying AI-generated papers are… it sounds more like a headache for the editors really.
In general, journals don’t have to be perfect; mostly researchers read research papers. You already have to read critically (publish-or-perish has been a thing for a while, so there are plenty of not-so-great papers out there). Peer review is just the “entry” barrier, science is a social process and papers become more or less influential based on a fuzzy process of citation, conference talks, and peer-to-peer suggestions.
> it sounds extremely time-consuming.
For whom? Surely the authors can find an hour after submitting the paper to a journal?
Beware that a reviewer easily spend a full week on reviewing a paper, and there are typically three of them. So if one hour of conversation can save three weeks work, it sounds worth it.
I was thinking for the reviewer. Also note that I was only answering as to why it wasn’t done in the past.
For the time comparison, I’m not sure, it doesn’t seem quite apples-to-apples:
1) It is scheduled time vs unscheduled.
2) There must be some base rate consideration… the papers being discussed here were planned to be desk-rejected.
Maybe it could be a good process for saving papers that were going to be desk-rejected, but I dunno, that seems like it’d just lower the quality standards.
But it's not the reviewers who do it, it's the handling editor. Who spends relatively little time per paper (compared to authors and reviewers).
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