Journal of I've Never Heard of It

One of the exciting things that begins to happen during the postdoc, if you're lucky, is that you yourself will be asked to serve as a reviewer for some journals. This is great news because it means your name is, however tentatively, respected. Furthermore, you have the opportunity to demonstrate yourself a thoughtful scientist and referee to some editors. And finally, you learn a lot about the review process by being on the other side.

So it was with excitement that I opened up an email today asking me to review a manuscript. Here's the tricky thing, though: I've never read a single article in the journal that sent me this request. This is a not uncommon scenario for a junior person doing reviews--you're low on the food chain, and the journal that asks your opinion may be correspondingly low. On the other hand, it may be that this journal is respected but that it publishes very few papers from my subfield, which is why I've never read anything in it.

I asked a mentor how I should approach the review, given that I don't have any idea how to grade the "novelty and significance" of a manuscript if I don't know the reputation of the journal. His advice was interesting: "You should always apply the same standard of accuracy to all manuscripts you review, regardless of whether they are for Nature or Journal of I've Never Heard of It. Let the editor worry about whether the paper is novel or exciting enough. Your job is to make sure that the authors have done the proper controls to come to the conclusion they state in the abstract." So, after I have a chance to look over the table of contents for the past few issues of this journal, this is what I will do.

Well, that and looking up some however-irrelevant-and-useless impact factors.

To our dearest beloved SfN

Abstracts for the unmissable* Society for Neuroscience annual meeting are due today.

So we're getting excited for the upcoming meeting, right? Should we get our plane tickets? Reserve a room? Oh wait, the meeting starts November 13th.

Today is May 13th. I did a quick count, using toes for the extra two months, and this means that the meeting is six months away.

Because the number of attendees at SfN is in the tens of thousands, I thought that the delay between abstract submission and meeting actually occurring was somewhat forgivable back in the days of 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. Back when 64 MB was the size of a fancy new hard drive. Someone's got to program all those abstracts into thematically organized sessions, and make sure that the Big Shots in my subfield are scheduled to give their symposium talks at the exact same time as my poster so that I can never ever go to a symposium talk I actually care about. That doesn't just happen by itself, people.

But now? When Google can predict, before I finish typing, the rest of the last name of the ex-boyfriend I'm thinking about? When we can crowd-source an encyclopedia with useful entries on "Factors affecting the crack spread"? [I clicked on the "random" button, I swear.] Does it honest to God still take six months to sort 20,000 abstracts with preselected keywords into one of 8 themes and some number of subthemes/sessions?

Do they have a small staff of medieval scribes rewriting everything in calligraphy, or what?

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* Because it's the only place you can see every single neuroscientist, living or dead, you have ever known. As a meeting, it makes you want to drink hemlock by Day Two.