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Authors, Editors, and Referees
When an author completes a paper, it is submitted to the editor of a journal (or
the program chair of a conference) for publication. 3 The editor sends the paper to
referees, who evaluate the paper and return assessments. The editor then uses these
assessments to decide whether the paper should be accepted, or, in the case of a
journal paper, whether further reviewing or revision is required.
Authors are expected to be honest, ethical, and careful in their preparation of
papers. It is ultimately the responsibility of the author—not of the journal, the editor,
or the referees—to ensure that the contents of a paper are correct. It is also the author's
responsibility to ensure that the presentation is at an appropriate standard and that it
is their own work unless otherwise stated.
Referees should be fair and objective, maintain confidentiality, and avoid conflict
of interest. In addition, they should complete reviews promptly, declare their lim-
itations as referees, take proper care in evaluating the paper, and only recommend
acceptance when they are confident that the paper is of adequate standard. Although
referees can generally assume that authors have behaved ethically, many weak or
flawed papers are submitted, and a disproportionate amount of reviewing is spent on
such papers—in part, because they are often resubmitted after rejection. Moreover,
it would be negligent of a referee to assume that a paper is correct and interesting
for superficial reasons such as good writing, impressive mathematics, or author pres-
tige. Referees must also ensure that their reviews are accurate and of an appropriate
standard.
The editor's responsibilities are to choose referees appropriately, ensure that the
reviewing is completed promptly and to an adequate standard, arbitrate when the
referees' evaluations differ or when the authors argue that a referee's evaluation is
incorrect, and use the reviews to decide whether the paper should be accepted.
These participants have very different perspectives. At submission, an author
may feel that the work is remarkable and perfected, and is likely to be sensitive to
criticism. Even researchers who are not working in the environment of a first-rate
research centre, or who have never had guidance from a more experienced researcher,
may well be convinced that their papers are excellent and that negative comments
are misguided. A consequence is that they may seek ways to address issues raised
by referees by making only minimal changes, and need to be persuaded through
convincing argument that the referees' views are reasonable.
In contrast, the referee and editor are likely to feel unexcited (the majority of sub-
missions are rejected) and disbelieving—in submissions, strong results are usually
wrong. And they too may be sensitive, in this case to typical, frustrating faults, and
also to undue criticism of their own work in the author's literature review. In a sense,
the reviewing process can be seen as a mechanism for reconciling these different
points of view.
3 If you are new to research, you may want to skip the rest of this chapter—but do return to it before
you submit work for reviewing or examination.
 
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