call me persnickety. i don’t care.

1. If I agree to review a paper, but then I am sent the paper and it is not double-spaced (and over 10 pages), I will not review it.

2. If I am sent a paper that is said to be a double-spaced version of the paper I was sent, but then I open it up and it is a paper on a completely different topic, I will not review that paper either.

Author: jeremy

I am the Ethel and John Lindgren Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

6 thoughts on “call me persnickety. i don’t care.”

  1. 1 – Hm. I find it really tedious to read double-spaced text (a relic, like so much else in academia — e.g., baroque citation systems — of a bygone age) and am generally quite happy to get the paper and find that is something-like-properly typeset. This, of course, is simply another species of persnicketiness.

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  2. If I’m going to review a paper, I’m going to be marking it up. Maybe if I had better handwriting or used finer point pens I could mark up a single-spaced text more effectively. But more than a few pages of single-spaced Times New Roman also hurts my eyes.

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  3. I see how we differ — if I’m going to review a paper, I’m going to be googling the title and writing up some stuff based on whether the author ever said hello to me at the ASA meetings. No, wait. That’s not right.

    Part of the problem is that “single-spaced” is not at all the same as “properly typeset”. MS Word has a lot to answer for, but you knew that already.

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  4. Same reason as Jeremy, I prefer double-spaced.

    So how much extra time can I take when the journal first neglects to send me the paper at all, but sends a note that my review is late; next sends me the paper scanned in so badly that every other page is unreadable, then ignores my request for a readable copy, but sends another note about lateness; then sends another unreadable version, repeat last phase; and finally two months after the initial date of contact sends a copy that I can sort of decipher?

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