- peer review

Challenging conventional wisdom and the conventional peer-review system—a recent experience

11 December 2020 by Demetris Koutsoyiannis

by Demetris Koutsoyiannis & Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz

Having published some hundreds of papers over decades and having been co-editors of Hydrological Sciences Journal (HSJ) for a long time (ZWK for 18 years, DK for 12 years), we have been interested in the peer-review system. Trying to diagnose its pathologies and suggest remedies, we have written several editorials published in HSJ (Kundzewicz and Koutsoyiannis, 2005, 2006; Koutsoyiannis and Kundzewicz, 2007, 2009). We also collaborated with editors of other hydrological journals and compiled joint editorials, published in several journals simultaneously (Blöschl et al., 2014; Koutsoyiannis et al., 2016; Quinn et al., 2018).

Record rejections

14 December 2013 by Demetris Koutsoyiannis

As 2013 is approaching its end, I devoted some time on my annual accounts of several issues. One of these issues concerns the papers which I have published. It is a good yield: sixteen peer-reviewed papers (in journals), also counting those in press which will be published in 2014. Even without counting the latter, perhaps 2013 is the year with my record number of journal publications. I have thus reasons to celebrate.

But the reason I am writing this memo is not this. It is the fact that in 2013 I managed to publish several papers that were rejected earlier. It was the academic year 2011-12 which offered my record number of rejections, but rejections are painful in the beginning and it takes some time for the negative feelings to turn into positive. This time has passed and I feel I can now celebrate my record rejections.

Actually, I am proud for my rejected papers. Some of them are my top cited ones (in particular, the top #1, #3 and #6 in my current Google Scholar record). In my web site I have marked my rejected papers so they can easily be located. Also, in each one I publish on line the prehistory of rejections (reviews, rejection letters, rebuttals etc.).

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Blog discussions, conference presentations and peer review

21 July 2012 by Demetris Koutsoyiannis

(Reposted from Marcel Crok’s blog “De staat van het klimaat”)

I believe that science blogs have offered a very powerful means in scientific dialogue, which is a prerequisite of scientific progress. I have very positive personal experiences. In 2008, a poster paper in EGU, “Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series”, was widely discussed at blogs and this was very useful to improve it and produce a peer-reviewed paper, “On the credibility of climate predictions” , which again was widely discussed at blogs. In the follow up paper, “A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data” we incorporated replies to the critiques we have seen in lots of blog comments.