Reviewers say the darndest things June 11, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in career, engineering, research, work.Tags: proposals, reviewer comments
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I’m not sure what happened this year, but as the feedback from this past fall’s proposals have come in, I’ve been a bit flabbergasted. It seemed like last year, the feedback was a lot better. There were a lot of suggestions for improvement.
This year’s comments were…stupid. There was nothing constructive about it. There was nothing that could be used as suggestions for improvement.
Aside from the commentary I mentioned yesterday about my marital status, there were lots of other fun oddities to pick on.
I think the first thing that was frustrating were the contradictory comments. Reviews like “excellent detail” coming alongside “too technical.” Some of that is to be expected.
What I wasn’t expecting was a resubmission from the previous year having stellar reviews in comparison with the first year (totally nailed the broader outcomes, which were cited as rather weak the previous year)…yet the ratings didn’t change at all. Huh?
Next there was the reviewer who obviously pasted some of his/her review from another proposal into our review. Ironically, I think this reviewer also commented on formatting issues in the proposal. (I apparently didn’t notice that Word puked on a reference.)
Then there was the reviewer who cited some ‘scientifically based’ concerns about a chemical that we were using. There were supposedly health issues associated with use of this chemical…which had nothing to do with what we were doing. Worse yet, he was completely wrong. One only need to look at the CDC website to find toxicity info saying that the claims the reviewer were saying had been “well established for a decade” had never been proven and were probably related to something else.
Finally, I’m really beginning to wonder how many reviewers actually read the proposal at all. When you’re inundated with questions that were clearly addressed in the proposal (including the above mentioned toxicity issue), you gotta wonder how effective the skimming really is.
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