Of Illegal Procedure and Other Impediments to Progress

Extract

Over a period of several months in mid-1994 I became aware, as if by chain-reaction accident, of four instances in which scholarly journals declined to accept critiques of articles that had previously appeared in them. Interestingly, in none of the four cases was the critique rejected on the grounds of inherent quality, and in all cases the critique was considerably shorter than the original article. In one case a social science journal rejected a submission simply as “too polemical.” Another critical response was declined on the grounds that the critique in question had a “style correspond(ing) to a section on ‘Commentary’ or Debate that [the journal in question] does not have.”

In a third instance, the editors of a journal rejected a criticism of an author's case on the grounds that the earlier article had already managed to “accommodate the sort of criticism” being offered, even though the latter was evidentiary rather than methodological. Finally, the editor of yet another journal solicited and received two opinions about a paper submitted to it that disputed the arguments and conclusions of an article that had appeared there a few years earlier. Both referees (I was one of them) recommended publication, and did so with detailed arguments and suggestions for revisions, which the author successfully undertook. Yet the revised paper was rejected on the grounds that it would be “incomprehensible” to most readers—even though it was less technically dense—and better written—than the published paper that it was refuting!