Peer Review Process Quotes

I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.

Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

I suspect that the peer-review system carries a good part of blame for the fact that something like sixty percent or more of journal articles are never quoted (which means leaving no trace on our joint scholarly pursuits), and (in my reception at any rate) the "learned journals" (with a few miraculous exceptions that entail, prominently, TCS) ooze monumental boredom.

Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.

It is common, and encouraged by many journals, for research to be judged by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it. But as a journal's score is an average, it says little about the quality of any individual piece of research.

You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature.

There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).

With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.