The power of fact checking. In Academic reviews

In these last days, I had the opportunity of reviewing two papers from two different ISI/Web of Science journals.

Both papers cited external sources (journal articles) for justifying important statement on which both the works were based. I checked the whole stuff.

PAPER 1 was stating that no studies were present about the topic object of the study. I was doubtful about the statement, and I largely surfed academic databases. After about 45′ I gave up, literally no study was present on the specific topic. In my view the paper was poorly written, but the scientific value was noticeable, due to its innovative characteristics.

PAPER 2: perfectly written, good figures and language. It stated that a certain model was performing better that other similar cases, described in 2 sources. I checked both of them, but the cited papers referred to completely different topics! Honestly, I assumed a typo from the authors. However, the whole construction of the paper was undermined.

Both of them, however, didn’t cite relevant literature in their discussion. I suggested adding some.

I recommended major revisions to both, and I reflected on the fact that actually lots of academics are evaluated for the number of citations that their articles get. Wrong citations and/or missing, and more over instrumental citations can impact on a researcher career. Due to this, my recommendations for myself, as a reviewer are the follows:

• check better most of the citation, at the best of my possibilities;
• try to accept reviews coming from research areas which I know best, giving, if possible, suggestion for paper discussion sections;
• when recommending adding some literature, apart from exceptional cases, suggest always one-two papers, but always leave to the authors a free choice, according to their knowledge and experience;

In doing this, of course one will be surely exposed to conflict of interests that should manage at the best of his intellectual rigor. Two are the ways to be followed: common sense, and Open Reviews.