如何避审稿人的大斧？（简介）

New Roman" size=4>Guest Editorial
How to Avoid the Reviewer’s Axe:
One Editor’s View

 

如何避审稿人的大斧

 ----一个编辑的建议

From Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, Vol.12, No.3, June 2003

I. INTRODUCTION


SINCE this is a personal commentary, I will use the first person, something that no proper writer of scientific dis-course would ever do. As an author of many technical papers over my 35-year academic career, I have too often felt the anx-iety of opening that envelope from the journal editor, which, from its bulk, obviously contains my precious manuscrīpt, re-turned to me for either minor revision, massive rework, or—the ultimate wound—assignment to the manuscrīptal trashbin.  

由于本文是个人观点，因此我用第一人称来写，一些严谨的科技论文的作者一般不会这么做。在我35年的学术生涯中，我也写作很多科技论文。我也多次感受到打开杂志编辑来信时的紧张心情，这些信中当然有我珍贵的手稿。它们被退回来，有的要作小小的修改，有的要大量重写，或者完全被否定--只能丢进垃圾桶。

Now, having spent some 17 years on the opposite side of the table, my cumulative experience with many manuscrīpts and almost equally many unhappy authors is that the primary reason reviewers attack certain manuscrīpts is that those manuscrīpts are genuinely flawed. Many, if not most authors won’t agree, at least not at first. So I thought it would be helpful to authors if I were to set down some practical suggestions for preventing the reviewer’s axe from giving the authors a whack.

现在，作为与作者相对的编辑和审核人已经有17年了，我从大量的手稿和相当数量的伤心的作者中积累的经验表明，审稿人诟病某些手稿是因为其的确存在缺陷。许多，如果不是大多数，起先是不承认的。因此，我想如果我能给作者们提出一些实用的建议，使他们能避免审稿人“大斧”的打击，对他们或许是有帮助的。
A scientific manuscrīpt is intended to communicate new in-formation and to teach new material to a willing audience. Many authors forget this simple fact; rather, they view the writing process as an opportunity to bolster their own egos and impress the reader, even discomfit the reader somewhat, either with too much material or too little. Since there are many different styles of paper, I will select a hypothetical example of an experimental paper in which the authors make a minor advance in an estab-lished experimental method, and they then use this method to obtain some new results that are to be compared with a model Digital Object Identifier .1109/JMEMS.2003.814319 that is also a minor modification of already published work. Along the way, some unusual behavīor is observed that the mod-ified model cannot explain. The authors believe that they under-stand why this behavīor is observed, and wish to propose their explanation, even though they have not yet done the definitive experiments to prove their hypothesis.
科研论文的目的是要交流信息或教给一些需要的人新的西。许多作者忘记了这个简单的事实，而把写作的过程当作是炫耀自己和让读者注目自己的机会，甚至在一定程度上使读者不快，如提供太多或太少的信息。由于论文的种类很多，我将选取一个假想的实验论文的例子，论文的作者对建立实验方式做了小小的改进，他们用这种实验方式取得了一些新的结论，并把这些结果与同样也只是对已发表的理论模型做了一点小改进而得到的结果进行对比。由此，他们观察到一些特别的现象，而这些现象一些改良的模型无法解释。作者们认为他们理解了他们为何得发现这些现象，并想发表他们对此的解释，尽管他们还没有进行过必要的实验来证实他们的假设。