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From: hamid@hilbert.logiclab.cis.syr.edu (Hamid Bacha)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Referees
Message-ID: <1199@cmx.npac.syr.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 89 22:42:10 GMT
Sender: usenet@cmx.npac.syr.edu
Reply-To: hamid@logiclab.cis.syr.edu (Hamid Bacha)
Organization: Logic Lab, CIS Dept., Syracuse University
Lines: 40


I was deeply offended by some of the comments made by one of the referees
of a paper I sent to ICLP'89. In fact, this referee stopped short of
accusing me of plagiarizing someone else's ideas. The authors of the paper
he referred to are colleagues of mine. I am thoroughly familiar with their
work as they are with mine. The only connection between the two papers is
that both address the issue of Prolog and Content-Addressable Memory.
It is clear to me that the referee either did not bother reading the paper,
or did not understand it. He claims to be very knowledgeable in this area,
yet he went on to make some outrageous comments. (A very competent referee
rated the same paper very highly and, more important, made suggestions that
clearly show that he read the paper and understood it.)

In light of this experience, I was wondering how many other people may have
been subject to this type of refereeing, and whether there is any mechanism
in place to weed out bad referees. I would like to make it clear that I am
not trying to seek any revenge, or just trying to raise hell because my paper
got rejected. It is just that this experience opened my eyes to a potential
problem. I was just wondering whether there is any way of sorting out
incompetent referees. Or is it the case that once a referee, always a referee
no matter what kind of job one does. Do authors who have been treated unfairly
have any recourse? If so, what can they do? Should they write to the Logic
Programming Committee? Does this committee take any action against referees
that have been constantly pointed out as being unfair or incompetent?
Would this lead some authors to blaming referees for rejecting their papers
instead of the quality of their work?

I applaud the push by some members of the Logic Programming Community,
particularly E. Shapiro, toward raising the standards of the ICLP by
by accepting fewer but of higher quality papers. If so many low quality
papers were accepted in the past, does not that suggest a possible problem
with referees. I was just wondering whether anything can be done in this area.



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         Dr. H. Bacha
         Coherent Research, Inc.
         100 E. Washington Street
         Syracuse, New York 13202