by Stuart A. Borman
C&EN staff members routinely send their articles out to be reviewed for technical accuracy. Many journalists disdain this practice, but we have found that prior review pays many benefits in terms of the accuracy and completeness of the final published product. But what goes on behind the scenes during the review and revision process has occasionally been tumultuous.
A good example of this is the article I wrote about a new technique reported in a major journal by a chemistry professor whom I’ll call A. I solicited comment on A’s work from other people in the field. One of them, B, made a short statement to the effect that A’s concept wasn’t totally original—that there were antecedents for it. This seemed a reasonable point, and I included B’s comments in my draft.
When A received an advance copy of my draft for review, he was unhappy about B’s comments, to put it mildly. He requested that they be deleted from the draft and made a series of phone calls to me and my editors in an effort to get the comments removed.
In the calls, he pointed out that he was a very prominent and important person in the field of chemistry and would be mad at C&EN forever if we published the comments. (I ‘m not kidding about this.) He also said that he wouldn’t have brought his work to our notice (which he indeed had done) if he had known that anything derogatory would be written about it; that B’s comments were factually incorrect; and that A’s graduate students had worked very hard on the project and would be crushed and devastated if B’s comments were to see the light of day in print.
I tried to contact B to check if he continued to support his statement in light of A’s technical criticisms of it—which were kind of sketchy. But, as chance would have it, B was away from the office and unreachable at the time we needed to go to press with the story. So, in what I believe was the worst decision I ever made as a journalist, I decided to take the prudent course and deleted B’s comments from the article.
Did I mention that at that time A was starting a company to commercialize the new technology? In an initial interview, he had told me about the company, and I had included this information in my draft. But after our little tiff, he changed his mind and said the company should not be mentioned in the story. I agreed to delete that information, too. But this further demand on his part made me wonder if the need to obtain financing for his new company and not simply a scientific issue was what had really made him so apoplectic about B’s comments.
After publication of my article, I finally managed to reach B. He was very disappointed about our having deleted his comments, which he continued to stand behind.
Ironically, since the time this all occurred, I’ve sensed a very cool reception from A when I’ve had occasion to contact him. Perhaps this is oversensitivity on my part. Nevertheless, I believe that not only did I compromise journalistic principles by acceding to his demands, but I also failed to accomplish anything in terms of patching over the bad feelings that had arisen between us.
Then there was the time professors C and D achieved the same scientific results at about the same time. An advance copy of C’s paper was made available to me by the journal in which it was going to be published the following week. Knowing that D was also working in that field, I sent him a copy of C’s paper for comment. Professor D then informed me that he had a paper in press in a different journal that reported essentially the same findings. He already knew about C’s paper, he said, and he was trying to have the publication date of his own paper moved up to match more closely the publication date of C’s paper. Professor D’s paper had been submitted at an earlier date than C’s paper, but C’s was going into publication faster.
Professor C went ballistic when he received a review copy of the rough draft of my news story and found me crediting two groups, instead of just one (his), for the scientific achievement. While my story was still in press, C wrote a complaint letter to my editor, charging that I had inappropriately tipped off the opposition by soliciting advance comment on C’s work—although this is standard operating procedure for science journalists.
Professor E, another person whose input I had solicited for the same story, commented that D’s work was actually superior to C’s in one way. When C saw E’s comment to that effect in my draft, he phoned E and asked him to withdraw the comment. Professor C convinced E that the comment was unfair. Professor E then phoned me and asked me to delete it from my draft. Since E was no longer willing to stand behind the comment, I deleted it, so his interesting critique of C’s work never made it into print.
Obviously, prior review gives sources a measure of control over the editorial process—some journalists would say a totally inappropriate degree of influence. Nevertheless, I continue to value it greatly. In the final analysis, a reviewer’s power is limited to suggesting or recommending revisions. An article’s final published form is up to the judgment of the writer and his or her editors. Even if that judgment is sometimes imperfect, that’s not the fault of prior review.
In fact, for each horror story about the problems engendered by the review process, I could tell 100 more stories about how my articles have been immeasurably improved as a result of reviewer comments.