Peer Review, Amis Style

I have read for pleasure for as long as I remember, some books haunting me for years after I finish them, others drawing me in only while they last. But two authors had a particularly formative influence on me in my late teens, in very different ways. Richard Dawkins caused me to reassess my position in the world. And Martin Amis showed me that so-called literary novels could also be pretty good fun. In the couple of decades since, my tastes have changed. Amis’s early novels, which made such an impression, were written while he was much younger than I am now. They are probably best left to sixth formers and twentysomethings. And as for Dawkins, well, I was convinced early on, argumentitatively so for a while; but the need to fight those fights left me as I drifted into the happy state of live and let live that Ben Goldacre wonderfully characterises as ‘apatheism’: "I'm an apatheist. It's not that i don't believe, it's more that I find all discussion of the issue shit-boring". Dawkins, of course, is still fighting; and Amis is still writing. Indeed, superficially the two seem to have followed similar trajectories from exclusive schools through Oxbridge and early brilliance and into… well, if satirist Craig Brown’s name hadn’t appeared at the bottom of this set of (supposed) Dawkins tweets would you have known they were in Private Eye? And his second volume of memoirs was greeted in Nature thus: “Brief Candle is about as edgy as Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones cranking out the 3,578th rendition of 'Brown Sugar' — a treat for fans, but reinscribing boundaries rather than crossing them”. Amis is also an easy target for ridicule, expressing with apparent seriousness not enormously sophisticated opinions on grown-up issues, like (according to the magnificent Chris Morris) 'a senile 12-year-old'. Nearly time (he's 66) for him to consider his own advice:

“Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at thirty, they peak at fifty… at seventy, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs.”

As with so many things I got up to when I was young, then, reading Dawkins and Amis is probably best remembered fondly than attempting again now.

And yet.

I just read a Martin Amis book. True, it was not a novel, rather a book of his literary criticism and journalism (The War Against Cliche - just the kind of ‘bits and pieces’ book I enjoy). But it was good fun, and reminded me of Amis’s twin saving graces. First, he can really write. It’s partly the technical stuff - elsewhere, he writes that you should never start successive paragraphs with the same word, unless for effect, in which case do three in a row. Impossible to unread that command and I’ve obeyed it ever since. Whether or not it makes a difference stylistically, it makes you think about your writing in useful ways. More generally I just derive great pleasure from reading a sentence like:

“Excluding a few dry-outs, in hospitals and prisons, and the very occasional self-imposed prohibition, Malcolm Lowry was shitfaced for thirty-five years”

or:

“The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedies; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull… The question ‘What happens next’ has no meaning, because there is no next in Don Quixote’s world: there is only more.”

The second reason to re-try Amis is that he’s funny.

For instance, he decides to review Desmond Morris’s The Soccer Tribe by writing six pages of anecdote about the travails of being an intellectual football fan (note for younger readers: in the 1980s football fans were a trainspottery bunch, before Sky required us to profess to enjoy the lucrative game), not mentioning the book until the final sentence, whereupon:

“I have only time to add that Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill, etc., and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false.”

For instance, on Norman Mailer:

“He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses.”

For instance, the new monster in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World

“…shows promise. It is a carnotaurus, a light-heavyweight with horns… ‘Diet: Meat’, as my dinosaur encyclopaedia bluntly assures us. This is good. In the Jurassic era, as in our own, vegetarians are a drag.”

So he can write, he can amuse, and he can, of course, be cruel. (On Crichton again: “Animals — especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors — are what his is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.”) But Amis’s reviews are also, in aggregate, much nicer than I had expected. He states as much himself: as a critic,

“[y]ou hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder… Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember… ”

This surprising (and admittedly somewhat self-interested - note the ‘how long they remember’…) sensitivity to the efforts of others - no matter how substandard - is echoed in his review of a volume of John Updike’s collected journalism:

“Kind to stragglers and also-rans, to well-meaning duds and worthies, and correspondingly cautious in his praise of acknowledged stars and masters, Updike’s view of twentieth-century literature is a levelling one. Talent, like life, should be available to all.”

Think on this, then, before you set upon the next unfortunate manuscript to land in your inbox. And try always to get kinder.

Science, Gender, and the Social Network

Some while ago, preparing a piece for the British Ecological Society’s Bulletin on the general scarcity of female ecology professors, we had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Anne Glover. (Shortly afterwards Anne went on to become EU Chief Scientist. Coincidence? You decide…) One of the things that Anne talked to us about was the importance of informal social networks in career progression within science. Business conducted after hours, over drinks. Basically Bigwig A asking Bigwig B if he (inevitably) could think of anyone suitable for this new high level committee, or that new editorial board; Bigwig B responding that he knew just the chap. That kind of thing. In some ways this is one of the less tractable parts of the whole gender in science thing. Much harder to confront, in many ways, than the outright and unashamed misogyny of the likes of Tim Hunt, simply because it is so much harder to pin down. We know that all male panels in conferences, for instance, are rarely the result of conscious discrimination, more often stemming from thoughtlessness, laziness, or more implicit bias.

With something as public as a conference, of course, then we can easily point out such imbalances, and smart conference organisers can take steps to avoid them. (My strategy, by the way, is to identify the top names in your field, and invite members of their research groups. Has worked wonders for workshops I have run.) But how to get more diversity out of those those agreements made over a pint (or post-pint, at the urinals)?

One way is to take steps to help a wide range of early career scientists to raise their profile. Be nice to them online, invite them to give talks, promote their papers, and so on. But another way into prominence is through publishing. Not your own papers (though that helps, of course); but the process of publishing others. Get a reputation for reviewing manuscripts well, and invitations onto editorial boards will follow. From their, editorial board meetings and socials, and your name starts to gain currency among influential people.

All of which is fine, but peer review is an invitation-only club. If you’re not invited, you’re not coming in.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I’m on a couple of editorial boards - Journal of Animal Ecology and Biology Letters. As a handling editor, I am responsible, among other things, for inviting referees to review manuscripts. And when I do this, you can bet your life that I will be calling on those potential reviewers nominated by the authors. Not exclusively, but certainly they will figure.

And I started to wonder what kind of gender balance there might be among these suggestions. 34 papers in, here’s your answer. (I should stress that the identity of the journals has no bearing on the following, all statistics are purely the result of choices made by submitting authors.) Over 40% of submitting authors did not suggest any female referees, with female suggested referees exceeding males on only 2 occasions, and a median proportion of 15% female suggestions. The number of suggested female referees does not increase with the total number of referees suggested, neither is there any relationship between the proportion of female authors (median in this sample of 1/3) and proportion of female suggested referees (correlation of 0.05, if you want numbers). Here’s a couple of figures:

What’s the message here? Maybe we need to start thinking more carefully about lists of names we come up with, not just when these choices will be public - speakers at a conference for example; but also - perhaps especially - when they will not. And not just because of benefits that reviewers may or may not eventually receive in terms of board membership and so on. We get quickly jaded about the whole process of reviewing manuscripts, and forget too soon what a confidence boost it can be to be asked.

And just a coda: I’ve been thinking about this blog post for some time, a year at least. What is depressing is the number of occasions over that year - Hunt’s ridiculous outburst merely the most recent - when I have thought ‘I must get that post written, it’s so topical right now.’ How many years since Anne Glover outlined all these issues to us? (Eight, and counting.) How much has actually changed?

Well, one thing has, at least - the rise of new social networks, the online community that can be cruel but can also be incredibly supportive, providing a voice for those whom certain public figures would prefer to remain mute. These networks are open, no longer dependent - thank goodness - on 1950s values, beer-fuelled patronage, and old school ties.

A Case for Anonymous Open Review

I recently reviewed a manuscript for the pioneering journal PeerJ. This presented me with a quandary. PeerJ’s experiment in open reviewing is nicely outlined in their recent post, and includes two steps: reviewers can sign their reports, and authors can publish the review history alongside their accepted paper. My quandary was this: I love the second idea, and think it is an important step forward in opening up the peer review process; but I don’t like to sign my reviews. Not because I want to hide behind anonymity - clearly, writing this post shows that I’m not going to any great lengths to hide my identity from the authors of the PeerJ manuscript - but rather because I think remaining anonymous makes me, personally, a better reviewer. So, on this occasion - despite producing what I consider to be a ‘good’ review, in that it was both pretty thorough, and very positive - I declined to sign. To explain why, here’s some history.

It started with so-called ‘double blind’ review, whereby manuscripts are anonymised before being sent to review. Or rather, it started with an argument about double-blind review. A paper said it benefited female authors. We disputed the evidence, and, although I know I’m predisposed to come down on my side of the argument, I honestly cannot see how anyone else can fail to agree with us - just look at our figure!!! And anyway, at a practical level how can it help, when only reviewers are blinded but editors make all the key decisions?

But I digress…

Thinking about double-blind review in turn led me to think about what I’d prefer to see in peer review, and openness seemed the way forward. At that time, only the first of PeerJ’s options was available, and for a while I started to sign all my reviews.

Well, I say ‘all’, but I noticed a trend: I was reluctant to sign my most critical reviews. This seems like basic human nature - it’s evident still in PeerJ, where reviewers are far less likely to sign reviews recommending rejection (see fig 5 here) - but is perhaps worth exploring more closely.

My particular field is relatively small, and I often know the authors of the manuscripts I review, at least well enough to say ‘hello’ to at conferences, sometimes much better than that. I have never seen this as a conflict of interest - I provide honest reviews whoever the author, and I have absolutely panned the work of some senior authors of very high standing - as well as some quite good friends - whose work I usually respect. I am much more comfortable doing this anonymously, not because there is anything in my comments that I would not, if forced, say to the face of the lead author; but simply because I would rather not be placed in that situation.

Yes, it all comes down to avoiding socially awkward situations. I will do almost anything to avoid face-to-face awkwardness. I am not one of those people who delights in pointing out a fatal flaw in someone’s work in the Q&A after a talk. I will find a million euphemisms for ‘crap’ if asked to comment on a (hypothetical, of course!) colleague’s substandard work. Whether you see that as a good or a bad quality in me probably depends on your cultural upbringing, but the simple fact is that I find the option of anonymity very appealing.

And so, having come to the conclusion that I preferred to remain anonymous when writing critical reviews, I felt the only morally consistent position for me to take was not to sign any reviews. Sometimes this is difficult. If I write an especially insightful (read: long) review of a piece by someone I really admire, it’s definitely tempting to sign. But no. Joey doesn’t share food, and Tom doesn’t sign reviews. Frankly - and I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is true of everyone - I think this makes me a better reviewer.

The other reason given for signing reviews is that it enables you to gain appropriate credit for your reviewing activity. I don’t really buy this - what kind of credit are you expecting? And how much? Let’s face it, writing a review can be hard work, but it’s much less demanding than writing the damn paper in the first place. My worry is that chasing formal credit encourages early career researchers to spend too long on reviews. I reviewed for Science a while back, and treated it with due seriousness: my review was several pages long, and really thorough, I thought. The other review stated, essentially: “Nah, not a Science paper”. I’m not saying this second review is something to aspire to, but you do need to learn to apportion time appropriately, and if you think a manuscript has very little merit, you probably don’t need six pages to say so.

Also: from whom are you expecting this credit from reviewing? You can already easily summarise your reviewing activity on your CV; I’m simply not convinced that adding a doi for each review will drastically increase your employment prospects or standing in the community. Or at least, it’s not something I feel I need at this point. For those who want credit, and feel like a doi gives them that, then of course it’s great to have the option.

I wouldn’t want any of the above to suggest that I am in any way against openness in peer review, which has numerous benefits. I would be delighted to see my (anonymous) reviews appended to published papers. There is of course an editorial issue here - it’s probably more useful to publish an essay-style review, à la Peerage of Science, than a numbered list of typos; and my experience is that many reviews themselves are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Who will review the reviews?! But in principle, yes, let’s open up the process. Transfer of reviews between journals - another form of openness, adding memory to the review process - is becoming more common too, especially within publishing houses, which is great, and ought to help avoid the kind of situation I wrote about here.

My point is that open, civil, and constructive reviews can still be conducted under anonymity. For the sake us shrinking violets who value its protection, I hope the publishing pioneers at PeerJ and elsewhere retain it as an option.