Local evolutionary psychologist David Rakison has developed a novel theory that incorporates the dynamics of Darwinian evolution into our understanding of the modern peer review cycle for empirical science articles.
“It came to me almost by accident,” said Rakison, “Just like it did with dear old Charlie” (The PLB assumes that “Charlie” refers to Charles Darwin and not the Peanuts character). “I had submitted a, in my humble opinion, beautiful article on a set of experiments looking at how children are inherently fearful of anything long and cylindrical that may resemble snakes. Three crisp & clear studies that were well designed and had, what we thought, were unambiguous results.”
The article in question was under review at a preeminent journal for a few weeks before Rakison got his reviews back.
“The reviews were bloody nuts!” said Rakison, “I half wondered if the reviewers were drunk when they looked at the paper. Particularly Reviewer 2 who could barely seem to put together two coherent sentences but waxed all poetic about how our findings didn’t make sense with the larger psychology literature.”
According to Rakison, the reviewers had requested that he tone down the certainty of his claims. “I said that ‘A is definitely associated with B’ and those idiots wanted me to say ‘A is maybe associated with B’, despite the clarity of the freaking data. So I toned down my conclusions to make these twits happy.”
The paper was then sent for a second round of reviews and apparently this is where things got interesting.
“Now the reviewers were convinced that I had the association backwards!” said an incredulous Rakison. “They now felt that it would be better to quote ‘link back up to existing literature’ if I said that B definitely causes A. No matter what the bloody data says! Can you believe it?”
Of course, the pressure to get into the high tier journal forced Rakison to reverse his hypothesis.
“I had no choice but to change my conclusions to make the reviewers happy”. However, it was in the process of doing his revisions that Rakison claims to have had his epiphany.
“I realized that just like the forces of natural selection in reproduction, there was a sort of selection to the publishing process,” said Rakison. “No matter what the data says, there is a selection force at play such that that only the articles that tow the party-line of the current zeitgeist will ever succeed in being published. And only published articles in high tier journals have a hope of spreading their intellectual contributions to future progeny.”
According to Rakison’s so-called theory of “theoretical selection”, no matter what the actual empirical results are, the review process applies specific pressures to a paper that orient its conclusions in particular directions. Only those authors who are “adaptive enough” to adjust their conclusions have their papers published, and thus have any chance of being read and cited. Those that don’t adapt end up in low tier journals or, worse yet, laid waste in the unreviewed limbo that is Arxiv (www.arxiv.org).
“Being an evolutionary psychologist I found these dynamics to be quite fascinating” said Rakison. “These evolutionary dynamics are why so many damn papers seem to say the same thing over and over again.”
Rakison says he plans to start a completely new research program dedicated to understanding these selection dynamics in the review process. At least, that is, if he can get his theory passed the reviewers.