Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Journal Reviewer Review

A recent paper of mine was rejected from Journal of Theoretical Biology. For fun, lets compare and contrast and selection from the reviewer comments ("MS" = "manuscript"):

From Reviewer #1:
Overall I really liked the work presented in this MS - by generalising the traditional models of the ecological economics underpinning solitary foraging behaviour the authors offer a very interesting (& in retrospect) intuitively appealing justification for accepting that the concorde fallacy may not always be fallacious.

From Reviewer #2:
This result seems to be of significance in biology, psychology, economics, and business, and I think that the paper is deserving of publication in JTB. The paper is also very well written, and the mathematical presentation is clear and precise.

Those two were pretty nice, and suggest that I should resubmit the paper with a couple tiny revisions and I'll be off and running. Great! Wait... What's this?

From Reviewer #3:
I regret to say I have no idea what this paper is about. The mathematical lingo is completely unfamiliar to me (after about 50 years of teaching and research in maths)...(details omitted)...(I recently had a grad student who wrote in this vein. When I asked him to explain in ordinary math, he gave up.) I didn't read any further. My advice is reject.

HUH?!