Stone Rice Big dot Net

Surely, the paper has would win the award for “Best eye-catching paper title”.

Frey, B. S. (2002) Publishing as prostitution? – Choosing between one’s own ideas and academic success. Public choice, 116: 205-223.

Survival in academia depends on publications in refereed journals. Authors only get their papers accepted if they intellectually prostitute themselves by slavishly following the demands made by anonymous referees who have no property rights to the journals they advise. Intellectual prostitution is neither beneficial to suppliers nor consumers. But it is avoidable. The editor (with property rights to the journal) should make the basic decision of whether a paper is worth publishing or not. The referees should only offer suggestions for improvement. The author may disregard this advice. This reduces intellectual prostitution and produces more original publications.

However, a quick look at the Standards of MIS Quarterly reveals that

[a]ssociate editors are guided by the recommendations of reviewers, but they do not necessarily comply with the majority recommendation of the reviewers. Instead, they are required to make their own judgment on the merits of a paper. Similarly, senior editors are guided by the recommendations of reviewers and associate editors, but they are required to make their own judgments on the merits of a paper.

The paper still has to fit the world view of the editors, tough . And my guess would be, that these guys can spot the flaws of a paper viewed from a mile away.

Some good advice on how to publish your research can be found here:

Lee, A.S. “Crafting a paper for publication,” Communications of the Association of Information Systems (20:7), 2007, pp. 33-40.

To sum it up, that is the main question everyone is asking when reviewing a paper.
However, when is it ok to accept the claims of the author?

Adapted from [1], I found this set of questions very helpful in determining whether to believe or not to believe:

1. What is the paper about?
2. What is the central claim?
3. What would be a good set of arguments to substantiate this claim
4. What are the actuals arguments brought forward by the author?
5. Why does the author establish these specific arguments
6. What is the quality of the arguments?

I think No. 3 is the most important question. Answering this question will also help in suggesting improvements in the review.

[1] Bördlein, C (2002): Das sockenfressende Monster in der Waschmaschine. Eine Einführung ins skeptische Denken (in German). Alibri, Aschaffenburg.