Empirical analysis tells Reviewer 2: “Go F’ Yourself”

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Peer review is often the key hurdle between obtaining some data and getting it published in the scientific literature. As such, it's often essential to keeping questionable results out of the scientific literature. But for vast numbers of scientists with solid-but-unexciting results, it can be a hurdle that raises frustrations to thermonuclear levels. So it's no surprise that many scientists privately wish that certain reviewers would end up engaged in activities that aren't mentionable in a largely family-friendly publication like Ars.

What was a surprise was to see a peer-reviewed publication make this wish public. Very public. As in entitling the paper "Dear Reviewer 2: Go F' Yourself" levels of public.

Naturally, we read the paper and got in touch with its author, Iowa State's David Peterson, to find out the details of the study. The key detail is that the title is somewhat misleading: it's actually the person who is somewhat randomly assigned to the Reviewer 3 slot who's the heartless bastard who keeps trying to torpedo the careers of other academics. For the rest, well, read on.

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