{"id":4946,"date":"2011-08-07T01:27:40","date_gmt":"2011-08-07T09:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4946"},"modified":"2011-08-07T02:10:02","modified_gmt":"2011-08-07T10:10:02","slug":"movin-on-down-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4946","title":{"rendered":"Movin' on down the Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the fiasco with Theory and Decision<\/cite> (see my entry of 28 March<\/a> and that of 18 April<\/a>), I submitted my paper on indecision<\/a> to yet another journal on 23 April.<\/p>

To my surprise, that journal gave my paper for review to someone whom I regard as having a markèd conflict-of-interest. I know to whom they gave it because the rejecting review that I received on 16 Jun was, also to my surprise, attributed rather than anonymous.<\/p>

Some of the criticism was legitimate, but would best have been handled by directing me to revise-and-resubmit. Some of the important criticism was absurd.<\/p>

For example, the reviewer declared

this is not how one writes proofs<\/q> in general (except may be in logic)<\/blockquote> Considering that the propositions are almost exclusively formal logic<\/em> (there not being much arithmetic to the structure), it's rather to be expected that the proofs will look as proofs (in or out of quotation marks) do in logic<\/em>.<\/p>

And, in defending the attempt to distinguish indecision from indifference<\/span> found in Indifference or Indecision?<\/q> by Eliaz and Ok<\/a>, the reviewer wrote that Mrs Watson (a hypothetical agent presented in that paper<\/a>)

is indecisive whenever she deems multiple choices as choosable<\/blockquote> But she also deems multiple choices as choosable<\/em> when she is indifferent<\/em>, and in both cases (according to Eliaz and Ok) makes her decision by flipping a coin.<\/p>

(In fact, Eliaz and Ok claim something more interesting about what distinguishes indecision from indifference, but an observable<\/em> distinction does not result from it.)<\/p>

I stared for a bit, and then sent to the reviewer a simple request for permission to cite the review in future versions of the paper<\/a>. (I offered no argument or evaluation; I just requested permission to cite.) The review is plainly not itself a publication<\/span>; it seems closer to being a personal communication<\/span>. And one is supposed to secure permission before citing personal communications.<\/p>

I waited for some days, and got no reply. I concluded that none would be forth-coming. I therefore effected what changes I felt should be made given that I could not cite the review, both to make straight-forward improvements, and to preëmptively meet repetition of what I regarded as illegitimate criticisms.<\/p>

Then I went over my big spread-sheet o' econ journals, and selected the next journal to which to submit the paper<\/a>. As with previous submissions, I read the author guidelines, and did some further rewriting and reformatting to tailor a version specific to that journal. I made the new submission on 28 July. Its reported status when I checked this morning was the same as that when I completed the submission process, so I presume that no editor has accepted assignment to it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the fiasco with Theory and Decision (see my entry of 28 March and that of 18 April), I submitted my paper on indecision to yet another journal on 23 April. To my surprise, that journal gave my paper for review to someone whom I regard as having a markèd conflict-of-interest. I know to whom […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[117,36,5,4],"tags":[1034,987,445,446],"class_list":["post-4946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-economics","category-personal","category-public","tag-indecision","tag-indifference","tag-papers","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}