Many Researchers believe that Reviewer No. 2 is uniquely terrible and is a monster always negatively influencing the reviewing process and delaying the submission results.
In a paper published on 25 June 2020 in the Journal Social Science Quarterly, a researcher David A.M. Peterson from Iowa State University in Ames, USA carried out a study to check the hypothesis that the Reviewer No. 2 is a uniquely poor reviewer by analyzing the data from a reviewer database from Political Behavior.
”The purpose of this review article is to test a very specific claim about Reviewer No. 2: He is the reviewer who holds us back. He is embodiment of all that we hate about other scholars. Reviewer 2 is dismissive of other people’s work, lazy, belligerent and smug ”, said Peterson, Scientist at Department of Political Sciences, Iowa State University. ”The main motivation for this article is that the broader community has decided that Reviewer 2 is a monster. A Google search for ‘Reviewer 2’ produces the interdisciplinary Facebook group ‘Reviewer 2 must be stopped!’ (which has over 9,000 members), a blog entry entitled ‘How not to be Reviewer #2’ and countless images combining almost every visual meme imaginable. In academia, it is fair to say that Reviewer 2 is the ultimate boogeyman.”
Data from 1,323 manuscripts submitted to the journal Political Behavior was collected. ”If every review is negative, the authors will be less likely to single out one of the reviewers for their malice. The result that really galls authors is when two of the reviewers are positive and that one reviewer is quite negative. It is in this case that a reviewer is really Reviewer 2. If it were not that, the editor would have given the manuscript a revise and resubmit.”
However the results obtained were quite astonishing. Study revealed that instead of Reviewer #2, Reviewer #3 is the one who is to be blamed for the negative evaluation. ”All of this malice is misdirected at Reviewer 2. Reviewer 2 appears to be no more likely than other reviewers to give a negative evaluation or to deviate substantially from the other reviewers. Reviewer 3 is the reviewer who is likely to be the negative outlier. He is statistically significantly more likely to be the reviewer, based on the overall evaluation, who dooms a manuscript. What is worse is that Reviewer 3 seems to be a crafty cretin. He is able to do this while Reviewer 2 takes the blame.”
copyright@EasMyPhD 2020
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