There is just no reasonable justification for academics to submit articles for peer review that resemble of a rough sketch more than a diligently crafted first draft. To put it bluntly: It’s disrespectful and selfish.
Peer review is primarily intended to ensure the quality of research. In practice, it’s voluntary community work that is essential for propelling the heaviest gears of the publishing machinery – at least as it is currently configured. The entire system faces numerous challenges, and it is likely ripe for revision or revolution, as many have advocated in recent decades. Here, I focus on a more specific issue: the submission to peer review of far too many articles that lack basic linguistic proficiency.
The question of whether academics “can write” has been posed countless times and typically revolves around style: that the texts are too rigid, overly formal, verbose, jargon-laden, obscure, or the like. However, it makes no sense to generalize about academic writing. There are, among researchers, excellent stylists, poor stylists, and perfectly passable stylists, just as there are among other writers, such as journalists and literary authors.
My concern is somewhat different and pertains to the fundamental linguistic proficiency of manuscripts submitted by academics to publishers and journals before the final version is published (or rejected). In recent years many commentators have voiced concerns about the writing skills of students. I share these concerns but wonder, at times, whether their lecturers are any better.
I must clarify that it is obviously hard to provide a sweeping diagnosis. There are no doubt disparities across various academic disciplines and among different journals. My experience may not be universally representative. However, having peer reviewed some thirty-plus manuscripts over the years, I must say that a surprising number of them have been riddled with elementary orthographic, idiomatic, and grammatical errors. Opening the document, red lines sprawl across the pages, indicating that the authors haven’t even bothered to subject the text to a spell-checking program.
“The authors haven’t even bothered to subject the text to a spell-checking program”.
I always strive to provide constructive feedback and refrain from derision, but there have been instances where I’ve returned manuscripts on the grounds that the texts are so linguistically inept that it’s pointless to strive to assess the academic content. The egregious examples are, of course, English-language texts written by authors with another native language. However, there is ample room for improvement even in Norwegian manuscripts written by Norwegian researchers. And it’s not just complex and theoretical discussions that are challenging to read; there is ample room for improvement in purely descriptive passages as well, in the presentation of other research, or of empirical findings.
I don’t necessarily think this is a symptom of some general decline in higher education, but rather that it’s down to a combination of time constraints, publication pressures, and, most notably, a cultural issue. Everyone knows that academic life is hectic. I have yet to hear of an anthology or a special issue where all contributions have been submitted within the original deadline, and I consider it fairly likely that such a circumstance has never occurred. And when delays become the norm, the natural consequence is that publishers and editors operate with a buffer — an “actual” deadline that is longer than the one communicated to contributors (and thus a kind of variant of the so-called academic quarter; a measure intended to mitigate a problem, but that loses its effectiveness as it becomes more widely known).
At first glance, this may appear to be a consequence of time constraints, but I suspect it’s more of a cultural issue. After all, most researchers don’t seem to have nearly as much difficulty handing in project proposals on time, where deadlines are non-negotiable. And in such documents the language has typically been meticulously scrutinized. It is surely a sign that something is wrong when academics appear to put significantly more care into documents designed to trigger for research than they do in the actual research itself.
“At first glance, this may appear to be a consequence of time constraints, but I suspect it’s more of a cultural issue.”.
Another explanation may be the notion that the main function of peer reviewing is to assess ideas and results, while language can always be refined later. Such a viewpoint rests on an overly rigid distinction between form and content. It seems to me that, in the humanities and social sciences at least, it mostly doesn’t make much sense to say of a text that “the thinking is good is but it’s badly written”. Good thoughts, observations, arguments, and contextualizations do not exist outside of language but emerge when they are precisely formulated.
Thus the main problem with researchers submitting linguistically sloppy manuscripts is that it weakens the research. It doesn’t necessarily render the research poor, but at least leads it to fall short of what it could and should have been. It also creates extra work at every stage of the publishing process. I’d estimate that it usually takes me roughly one workday to conduct a peer review. If the manuscript is riddled with linguistic errors it might well take twice as long, sometimes more. Moreover, it can be quite frustrating and demotivating to have to read sentences and paragraphs again and again, just to grasp what the author is really trying to say. It’s hardly surprising that many editorial boards find it increasingly hard to find peer reviewers for all the articles they receive.
Moreover, sloppy writing means editors (and proofreaders, for those who still employ them) are tasked with the unnecessary and unreasonable burden of ensuring the language is at an acceptable level. It’s also worth noting that publishers and journals do screen submission – not everything is forwarded for peer review, and it must be quite demanding (and disheartening!) to go through the manuscripts that are rejected at the first hurdle.
There is likely no quick fix here. Monetary compensation or institutional recognition for peer reviewing has been suggested as possible solutions, but while such measures may ease the recruitment problem, I can’t see that they get at the the root of the problem. That requires a change of attitude. There is just no reasonable justification for academics to submit articles for peer review that resemble of a rough sketch more than a diligently crafted first draft. To put it bluntly: It’s disrespectful and selfish. It is, in effect, saying to editors and peers: “Can you please assess the scholarly content of my text? If you find it to be up to scratch, I’ll take the trouble to write it properly”. Clearly, it should be the other way around: Linguistic diligence ought to be a minimum requirement for peer review.
I’d argue that publishers and journals need to provide tougher and more honest feedback. It’s undoubtedly easier said than done, and it may lead to fewer publications. However, in the long run, I think the research community would benefit from such a cultural change. No one writes flawlessly, and every manuscript benefits from linguistic refinement. However, when researchers submit scientific articles, there should be no need for a linguistic overhaul.
Peer reviewers can also contribute. I, for one, have made it a resolution to lower the threshold for returning sloppy manuscripts. If you can’t be bothered to review your own text before submission, I see no reason why I should take the trouble to peer review it.
This op-ed was originally written in Norwegian and featured in Khrono.
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