My field was the behavioural neuroscience side of psychopharmacology. Rats, brains, drugs, medicine.
My experience of peer review heavily featured:
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Obvious self-promotion (“why haven’t you cited my paper that isn’t even published yet?”)
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Critique of things not actually in the paper (“why did you do X?” when there is a paragraph explaining why we did not do X)
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Demands for things already done and in the paper (“why didn’t you do Y?” when a chunk of the results section is devoted to the findings of doing Y)
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A preference for discredited but traditional statistical methods rather than modern more reliable methods (“we’ve always done it this way”; the stats used throughout much biosci are garbage)
It was rather obvious that many of the reviewers barely glanced at the paper, and that even those who did offered critique that was seriously flawed.
Academic publishing is broken.
