In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
I have just received, hot on the heels of each other and two in one batch, three negative-to-relatively negative (two reject, one major revisions) referee reports that all incorporated, near the beginning, a sentence containing the exact phrase “in its current form”. The gist was always ‘the paper is interesting [another exact word], but cannot be accepted/does not succeed/etc. IN ITS CURRENT FORM’. Is this some kind of AI signal or something? If it was just two I think i’d have made less of it, but three in the course of three weeks is bugging me out. I don’t recall seeing this exact language ever, or at least with such frequency. Anybody else seen this phrase, or this type of sentence in a referee report? Is this just well-known referee speak?
I think these are pretty common things for referees to write. Indeed, I think I’ve written more than a few reports which say a paper is interesting but not publishable in its “present form.” So, it very much could be referees. At the same time, receiving three reports in a row that say exactly the same thing might send up yellow flags for me too, given recent discussions of referees using AI.
What do readers think?
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