Saturday, 29 September 2018

peer review - How to deal with rote "publication shopping"?



I spend a lot of time peer-reviewing paper submissions to conferences, workshops, and journals in my field. Sometimes I end up getting assigned a paper that I had already rejected from another venue. Usually the authors of the resubmission have at least attempted to address the flaws pointed out in the past reviews. But sometimes the paper is submitted in much the same form. That is, the authors have failed to correct the major errors and gaps identified and agreed upon by the reviewers. They may not even have bothered to fix simple mistakes such as typos (even when the reviewers helpfully itemized these). It seems that these authors have no understanding of or respect for the peer review process. Rather, they are adopting a rapid-fire approach of submitting the same paper to different venues in sequence (or in parallel, for all I know) until they luck out on a suitably unqualified or neglectful reviewing panel that happens to clear it for publication.


What I normally do when I receive such a resubmission is to copy, paste, and resubmit my previous review. After all, if the authors haven't bothered revising their paper, why should I spend any extra time re-evaluating it? But I wonder if that's all I should be doing. Does it make any sense to alert the journal editors/area chairs about these time-wasting shenanigans? Do serial "publication shoppers" ever get blacklisted, or at least a stern talking-to? Or is dealing with the same submissions over and over again just an inevitable and unmitigatable part of the whole peer review process?




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