That was the week that was ...
Jun. 26th, 2015 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melodyssister..the last week with any sort of routine for a while, I think, since the second week of camp was cancelled on Tuesday. A and S were very disappointed, as they were looking forward to a marine biology camp - but I guess not enough people felt like paying that price for four days of camp. They thoroughly enjoyed Japanese art camp, though, coming home today not only with manga booklets they had prepared themselves, but with papier-mâché Noh masks, origami animals, kimono designs and durga(sp?) heads. They also experienced a sushi workshop, and are now prepared to eat some kinds of vegetarian sushi, which is an improvement over refusing to eat sushi at all (they both reject fish in any form).
We spent three nights this week watching movies: two nights watching The Last Waltz on Netflix, while last night (Thursday), we went on a family outing to the cinema, for only the second time since coming to the US. We saw Inside Out, which deserves its rave reception. I won't go into the plot, so as not to spoil anything, but it was a complex and original story, with really fantastic animation and artwork. I thought that all the sweaters worn by the characters had really been knitted. Surprisingly, the traditional Pixar short before the main feature was terrible, in my opinion, by any standards, but especially considering how excellent Inside Out was.
Today M and D came over for supper - part of the campaign to finish everything in the pantry. As a result, we served meatballs, brown rice/wild rice/barley and succotash, with challah to start and brownies and biscotti to finish. We finished a bottle of wine (opened that evening) and a bottle of port (opened several weeks ago). M and D are such nice people; D is excellent with the boys, the kind of cool uncle Y was before he had kids of his own :). We made tentative plans for them to come over to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, which apparently are across the road from us, at the middle school field, and help us drink another bottle of wine, as well as taking everything we won't be able to donate to a food bank, like open bags of flour and jars of jam.
My own week was productive: I edited two articles and reviewed another. The article I reviewed was for Journal of Ethnopharmacology, and I am not sure I am really competent to review there. In this case, however, I thought the methodology sound and the information useful, but the English was so bad (the authors were Turkish) that the article was almost unreadable. I sent it back with an "Accept pending major revision / revise and resubmit", but ADC told me I should have rejected it. I'm not sure about that: the topic was certainly suited to the journal and really my only problem was with the language. I don't think the authors should be penalised totally for spending more time on their research than on their language skills.
I also started sewing another pair of shorts, which I intended to finish today but was attacked by a bout of lethargy/want to read all the fics instead of anything else.
We spent three nights this week watching movies: two nights watching The Last Waltz on Netflix, while last night (Thursday), we went on a family outing to the cinema, for only the second time since coming to the US. We saw Inside Out, which deserves its rave reception. I won't go into the plot, so as not to spoil anything, but it was a complex and original story, with really fantastic animation and artwork. I thought that all the sweaters worn by the characters had really been knitted. Surprisingly, the traditional Pixar short before the main feature was terrible, in my opinion, by any standards, but especially considering how excellent Inside Out was.
Today M and D came over for supper - part of the campaign to finish everything in the pantry. As a result, we served meatballs, brown rice/wild rice/barley and succotash, with challah to start and brownies and biscotti to finish. We finished a bottle of wine (opened that evening) and a bottle of port (opened several weeks ago). M and D are such nice people; D is excellent with the boys, the kind of cool uncle Y was before he had kids of his own :). We made tentative plans for them to come over to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, which apparently are across the road from us, at the middle school field, and help us drink another bottle of wine, as well as taking everything we won't be able to donate to a food bank, like open bags of flour and jars of jam.
My own week was productive: I edited two articles and reviewed another. The article I reviewed was for Journal of Ethnopharmacology, and I am not sure I am really competent to review there. In this case, however, I thought the methodology sound and the information useful, but the English was so bad (the authors were Turkish) that the article was almost unreadable. I sent it back with an "Accept pending major revision / revise and resubmit", but ADC told me I should have rejected it. I'm not sure about that: the topic was certainly suited to the journal and really my only problem was with the language. I don't think the authors should be penalised totally for spending more time on their research than on their language skills.
I also started sewing another pair of shorts, which I intended to finish today but was attacked by a bout of lethargy/want to read all the fics instead of anything else.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-27 08:54 pm (UTC)At the same time, the main journals are mostly publish in English. At least in my discipline, there are very few Thompson Reuters journals in Spanish. If I want my research to be read and discussed, I need it publishes in English. [Science is also a colonialist power play] It is my responsibility to look either for a good translator or a proofreader.
I read somewhere that papers coming from English-speaking countries has a significantly lower reject rates. There could be a lot of causes of the higher rejection rate for non-natives but an educate guess make me think that being unreadable might be an important issue.
I think you did the right thing. The main purposes of one role as reviewers is to seek the advance of scientific knowledge. If language is an issue, telling so to the authors is the most honest approach.