The Reviewing Process: Validating Results

Any scientific publication aims to advance the field of knowledge that it deals with, and therefore the editorial staff will always be seeking the most revolutionary papers among all of those received. On the other hand, the reviewers' task is usually a much more conservative one, as reviewers are responsible for verifying the realism of the methods proposed and the veracity of the claimed results. As the prestige of any scientific publication relies on both novelty and veracity of the papers published in it, validating the results presented in a paper is a major concern in the reviewing process, and it is crucial to the future of the publication. In this article, we focus on how to assess whether the results claimed by the authors are true, if they are exaggerated or fake, or if they have been copied from other works, i.e., plagiarism. Not appreciating the importance of this can lead to one of two extreme situations: • an excellent article is rejected because its results are unbelievable to the reviewer • an article that exaggerates the results obtained, or in which these results are made up or copied from another author's work, is published. Editors and reviewers should be aware of the former, as a rejected paper can be published in a competitor journal. A similar situation like this occurred when Enrico Fermi first submitted his work on the weak interaction theory of beta decay. Nature rejected the paper because it was considered unbelievable. Five years later, it was finally accepted when the results had already been proved [1]. The latter scenario usually has a very strong negative impact on the journal's prestige and credibility, and often ends in scandals when other researchers try to replicate the results claimed by the authors. Fortunately, these situations do not occur very often, but there are some recent examples that revealed some weak points of the editorial system. Kazuhiro Kosuge, past president of RAS, reported in the March 2011 issue of this magazine that, in 2010, serious plagiarism cases occurred and announced that the IEEE would take actions on the basis of IEEE ethics policies in the future. Because they erode the credibility of the academic community, new me-thodologies should be implemented to avoid these issues. With some publications , authors can attach multimedia files to the submitted paper to support the presented results or methodologies. Although this can be a …