Peer Review

Yesterday, we got the reviewer's comments back on the paper Gabi and I spent much of August writing and revising.

You spend months or years working on the research and then writing an article. With a wee prayer you email it off to a journal and the Editor takes a quick peek to make sure it meets even minimal standards.
You suggest some experts in your field as possible peer reviewers to whom the editor may or may not choose. Your paper goes out to 2-4 people and they, (or their sacrificial grad student or postdoc) read it over to check if it is worthy over the next 2-6 weeks or so. The comments come back to the editor, they decide to publish without revision, with minor revisions, with major revisions or kick your paper into the dump.

The best part is seeing the reviewers' comments because they are anonymous to the paper authors. When people don't have to put their names to things, the best and the worst of people become evident. Reviewers can request more experiments, rewriting or sections, the inclusion of references (often their own in a lame attempt of boost their own citation record), and in principal try to uphold and enforce a high standard of academic integrity and rigor.

Reviewers can be awfully nice:
James' Science paper got 6 pages of comments outlining the paper's awesomeness which were posted on our fridge for months.

Or they can be nasty:
"Your paper would have been good if it was published in 1973." (True story)
"Your paper reads like soup: not clear and of little substance." (Not a true story)

Our reviewers' comments? In a nutshell:
Like your paper. Well written (Woo Hoo!). Publish it. Typo on page 9 line 33.

That was the easiest reviewers' comments I have ever seen.
I spent yesterday doing the paper work for resubmission and it is off again! This time we await the galley proofs which are a mock up of how the journal article is going to look in print. This will be our LAST CHANCE for finding errors.