Wow, that paper really sucked!

My advisor runs research center A, and I thought it might be helpful if I had ties to another research center, so I wrote to the head of research center B. She invited me to their group meeting. One of the topics of discussion was a paper they had just submitted to two journals and had rejected.

It's a fairly obscure area - obscure in that most people think it's unimportant, not that it's hard - so it happens that the literature in the area is not so large, and I wrote one of the few papers which they cited. I said I'd be happy to read it. I had some hesitation after volunteering because I realized that I would be a logical referee, so I would miss the chance to put a new journal on my CV. It turns out it's a good thing that I volunteered because I would have almost definitely recommended the paper for rejection.

How demoralizing to read a paper co-authored by several people including a couple really prominent people which is so completely inferior to research done before. In fact, as a final project in an undergraduate course, I would give it a solid B. Reading the paper made me rethink joining their group.

Not to mention that the first thing they discussed at the meeting was how much they hated my advisor. Who had apparently committed two felonies: 1) criticized one of their papers too much and 2) while giving a presentation to new students to help them find research, he listed a handful of the many collaborators who worked with his center and didn't mention this particular senior faculty member. After 3 minutes of this carping, the center B director said, "That's New Postdoc's advisor." And then followed an awkward silence.

Plus they had the kind of meeting where they set aside 2 hours every single week, and the topics to discuss expand to fill the allotted time. And people just sit there for all 2 hours while so many topics are only relevant to a few people.

I wrote my response to their paper fairly quickly and narrowed my criticism down to 6 points. If they seriously followed my advice, it would be another month before the paper would be ready to send out, and the author had wanted to send it out next week.

Seeing research from this point of view really makes me understand more how important it is to be thick-skinned about criticism. Most criticism is well-intentioned, and it is incredibly difficult to phrase criticism in a palatable way. I rephrased almost every sentence of my review, and I'm afraid it still comes across as overly blunt. But, and I don't mean to be immodest, they should really listen to me: I am one of very few people who knows the literature of this tiny obscure area, and this paper as currently written adds nothing to the area, and I gave some suggestions that if they follow even some of it, their paper could add to the area. I just hope that they listen and don't start grouse about me as they groused about my advisor. And that I have more thick-skinned attitude towards criticism than they apparently are.