Premier "coup de gueule"

It is well known around the world that French people are always complaining. There is a dedicated word in French: "râleur".

So let me start about the reviewers .

In a ideal society of honest (wo)man of science, the reviewer should accept to evaluate a paper submitted by his colleagues if and only if he would be confident to fulfil the following conditions :

- to give his assessment within a reasonable timeframe (1 month)

- to provide a well-argued response, that is to ground his evaluation on datas, references, reasoning, ...

- to be able to put his emotional feelings apart.

Let me tell you what happened to the last three papers I submitted.

The first one is still under review (first submission 11 December 2018, revised version submitted 05 mars 2019). We are mi-september 2019 ...

Here is one of the reviews of the second one:

"This is my third review of this article. Performing motor and language test during an awake craniotomy in a non-native language speaker using an interpreter is fairly common practice in Neurosurgery. From attending meetings and talking to my colleagues, this is a fairly standard practice. I personally did not learn much from reading this manuscript. The authors did not put forth any new ideas that would make the procedure proceed more smoothly. They only performed one higher cognitive test in two patients. Their findings were not unique. Again, the authors don't tell us of any special procedures that were used to perform these tests."

This is both a classic and creative style at the same time. The classical part: there is nothing new, "la chair est triste, hélas, et j'ai lu tous les livres". The first time I received this type of bad faith statement, I have been upset for several days. It was for a paper that was eventually accepted in another journal and cited 131 times up to now (E Mandonnet, L Capelle, H Duffau. Extension of paralimbic low grade gliomas: toward an anatomical classification based on white matter invasion patterns Journal of neuro-oncology 2006, 78 (2), 179-185). At that time, I wanted to write a letter of several pages to this anonymous reviewer, telling him how bad it is to lie, or even worst, how bad it is to be sincerely convinced that because there is nothing new for him, there would not be anything new for the readers. Fifteen years later, I'm so used to this kind of reaction that I do not even read the end of the paragraph.

But this one was more creative. I particularly enjoyed the "From attending meetings and talking to my colleagues, this is a fairly standard practice". OK !!! I did not know that talking with colleagues was the new way of establishing scientific knowledge. Over the past years, I was probably too focused on writing papers, and I missed the new way of doing modern science: attending meetings, socializing around of cup of tea or a gin tonic, and ... that's it !

But the "palme d'or" is for the review of the third one :

"The data are reported as if scientists would be telling anecdotes ... they remained un-analysed! Even though this is a case report, it is possible to conduct quantitative analyses in the sense of descriptive as well as inferential statistics. As an aside, it remained unclear what was actually measured as TMT-B performance. Overall, I found your paper disappointing at very basic levels."

Remind me another one:

"First, the authors may not be fully aware of the difference between interpretation of data, speculation and conjectural mind wondering. They are all part of the same spectrum but the difference is based on the link between the objective finding and the conclusion that can be drawn from it. It is clear that in this paper the thread between the two is so thin and stretched that the authors are more launched into a fishing expedition than a scientific solid research quest. In my view the conclusions reached by the authors are not supported by the results they describe." (about a paper accepted few months later in 2019 in Neurology).

Yes, as surgeon, we are telling anecdotes, but documented anecdotes fully contribute to scientific knowledge. Fuck the statistics ! And yes, a fishing expedition might be much more fertile than an unflavoured solid report. Proposing a new model could generate fruitful studies attempting to validate or contradict the underlying hypothesis.

Now, the real question: why did these reviewers exhibit these behaviours ? Why did they react subjectively and emotionally, rather than sticking to the good practices of well-argued reviewing ? A topic for a future post ...

Et comme le rappelait l'injustement oublié Vialatte, "Et c'est ainsi qu'Allah est grand".