Just finished my GECCO reviewing, and I must say that is seriously sucks when people don’t attend to even the most basic of issues. Two things almost guaranteed to majorly annoy a reviewer:
- Weird random floating fragments of text that are obviously the disemboweled remnants of some cut and paste action.
- Only 8 entries in the bibliography on a subject that has been heavily researched for over a decade.
And just guess the average publication date of 8 fine references.
1985.
Yeah, over 20 years ago.
3 entries were books (two of which were over 10 years old), and the only 2 journal articles were from 1938 and 1964 respectively.
Strangely enough, I didn’t encourage acceptance of that paper.
The really depressing thing is that most of our (undergraduate) students at UMM would do better than this.
No, maybe that’s the uplifting thing.
Maybe the really depressing thing is that I see papers with this kind of bibliography fairly often. I’d almost recommend some sort of automatic rejection system for obviously stupid bibliographies, but then people would just start padding their bibliographies with random citations to get past that blockade.
Sigh.
photo credit: markopoulos