I think you have the wrong engineer December 12, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, papers.Tags: electrical engineering, engineering, peer review, reviewer comments, skills
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Every few weeks, I get a request to review papers for a conference. (For those who are sciencey types, a lot of engineering conferences require full, peer-reviewed papers rather than abstracts.) At first, this was rather cool and accepted the first half dozen that came to me. Then I started realizing that it was a bad idea, but not simply because, as you expect, it required a decent amount of time.
I started realizing I had no business reviewing some of those papers. The reviews often request that you assess your own knowledge and expertise in the area. Unfortunately, many of them didn’t have an option that was similar to, “Ignorant dolt.” The best I could do was say I had a passing knowledge and try to make constructive comments on the lack of legible text in the legend and poor grammar here and there. Oh…and finding out that half of their text was copied and pasted from another document.
I have to wonder why they aren’t more careful about screening potential reviewers given most of my requests come from a service which describes my qualifications. After all, there are several subdisciplines within electrical engineering, and I don’t imagine too many people are knowledgeable about the state of the art for all of them. Beyond that, my undergrad is in physics, so my knowledge of EE is probably even more limited than your standard engineer.
I guess I’m probably a decent reviewer as long as as you’re only looking for someone who can point out when something is undecipherable. Maybe I should add that to my skills: unenlightening critiques.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
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