Can't stop blogging about book reviews!

My last post commented further about book reviews in the physics community.  An announcement today that the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has appointed a new editor for its MAA Reviews has reminded me that the mathematical community is doing relatively better on the book review front than the physics community is.  I don't read MAA Reviews regularly, but I see that it is a professional-society sponsored source of curated book reviews.  They also feature a Basic Library List, a downloadable spreadsheet which includes books they recommend for college and university libraries.  The list is annotated with a star system, with 3 stars for books considered essential, 2 stars for strongly recommended, 1 star for "recommended", and zero stars for "suggested".  I haven't examined the list in detail, but conceptually this seems to be a good idea, and quite useful for students and self-learners as well.

More broadly, I can't speak to the quality of MAA Reviews, as I'm not a regular reader, but the concept seems like exactly what I think is missing in the physics community.  As a bonus, all the content seems to be freely available online.  Unfortunately, using the search feature I was able to find only a single reviewed book in the field of fluid mechanics, and only 3 under physics.  Its coverage of statistics is not at all comprehensive, with only 6 books showing up in the search feature for statistics, 6 more for probability, with 3 more under probability theory, two under "Statistics and Probability", one more under Bayesian statistics, one each under classification and clustering, one more under data visualization, and one more under data analysis.

The Basic Library List has much better coverage, but no reviews are attached to the entries.  Looking at the fluid mechanics sections of the list, I count only 13 titles included, of which only two are rated at 3 stars (essential), both by James Lighthill:  his Waves in Fluids and Informal Introduction to Theoretical Fluid Mechanics.  Both are excellent choices that I would agree with.  There are no 2 star recommendations, but earning a single star are Acheson's Elementary Fluid Mechanics, Lamb's Hydrodynamics, Courant and Friedrichs' Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves, Stoker's Water Waves, and a book I'd not heard of until now, Gary Sod's Numerical Methods in Fluid Dynamics.  Aside from that last one, I would consider the rest as classics.  A 14th book, Batchelor's Introduction to Fluid Dynamics, also a classic, appears under "Mathematical Physics:  Fluid Mechanics".  However there are quite a few other classics that should have been included, many of which were written by physicists or engineers.  So, in execution the list might not live up to my expectations, but I suppose opinions about books are always subjective, so that no such list would make everyone happy.

In addition to MAA, I am a member of SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), and their SIAM Review (a journal sent to all members) maintains a healthy book review section.

Anyway, perhaps the physics community needs a source of free, online, curated book reviews in the spirit of MAA Reviews, to replace the fallen books section of Physics Today.  A professional society might be a good central place to host one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On book reviews

Not long ago, I lamented on this blog about the termination of Physics Today's book reviews section.  I mentioned that book reviews are pretty rate at the American Journal of Physics these days too.  However, I am pleased to see that the March issue of AJP does include a book review, of a recent text on soft matter physics.

The Atlantic recently had an article by Adam Kirsch about the termination of the Washington Post's book review section, the second time it has been terminated.  There is a good discussion there about disaggregation, that is, separating book reviews from other content.  It reflects a rethinking of the role of a general publication and how we no longer expect it to cultivate all areas of our culture.  This may indeed explain the loss of book reviews in Physics Today as well.

There may not be a single place to go to find authoritative reviews of physics books in the English language.  Perhaps a google search will find blogs or "booktok" videos that provide reviews, from actual users of these books.  But somehow this does not seem to me to replace the curated reviews from selected experts that might have been found in Physics Today, and perhaps can still be found at AJP and Contemporary Physics.  There are very few publications read across the community:  Physics Today and Physics World are the main ones I can think of in the English language.  I don't subscribe to Physics World, so I'm not sure if they even have, or have ever had, a book reviews section.

A peer reviewer discovers plagiarism

In the following, certain details are anonymized to protect the confidentiality of an academic journal's peer review process.

The Story 

Last month, I was asked to serve as a peer reviewer for a manuscript submitted to a certain European academic journal, published by Springer Nature.  I have no prior history with that journal, either as an author, peer-reviewer, or even a reader.  Nonetheless, the abstract of the manuscript was sufficiently intriguing that I agreed. 

I began working on my peer review.  I found that the paper was of appallingly low quality.  I have intermittently served as a peer reviewer for various journals over the last quarter century, but I have never, until now, thought to unequivocally recommend outright rejection of a manuscript.  I began drafting extensive comments to return to the author, with constructive comments on how the paper's quality could be raised to be of publishable value.  One of the points I made was the poor engagement with prior literature, especially with the manuscript's claim that previous investigators achieved little success in predicting certain features of the world.  To challenge the author, I decided to see if I could find papers that contradicted the claim about poor prediction success.  I started to find papers that claimed good prediction success, that were not cited in the manuscript.  I then had the idea of looking up the handful of papers that were cited in the manuscript in Google Scholar, to see who else had cited them.

Lo and behold, I quickly discovered a paper published the previous October in a different journal, published by MDPI, that was nearly identical to the manuscript that I was reviewing.  A few superficial changes were made, but vast portions were word-for-word identical, including the tables and graphs.  I was shocked.  The Springer journal I was reviewing for has, on its journal policies page, a warning that all manuscripts would be checked using CrossRef's similarity checker, using iThenticate, for plagiarism.  And I confirmed that the "victim" paper was indeed in the CrossRef database, so if such a check had been run, the manuscript should have been flagged prior to it being sent out for peer review.  

I next thought about contacting the author of the "victim" paper, but I discovered an online obituary for him, indicating he had passed in December, the month before the plagiarizing manuscript was submitted to the Springer journal!  I submitted my findings to the editor, using the journal's manuscript submission portal.  About a week later I emailed him separately, as I began to worry that other peer reviewers might be wasting time on this plagiarized manuscript.

The editor replied, and indicated he would reject the manuscript.  Indeed, he did so, but in the formal decision letter (for which the reviewers were cc'd), the reports of all the reviewers were included.  Thus I was right that we had all wasted considerable time on the manuscript.  There were a total of 3 of us reviewers, and I was the only one who had discovered the plagiarism.  One of the other reviewers recommended publication, but leveled lengthy criticism on the paper; the other was much more negative, saying the paper was "potentially interesting" but leveled numerous additional criticisms.  They both complained about many of the same things I did (in my draft comments, which were not shared with the journal) though I had also identified other issues not mentioned by them (again, not shared with the journal).

After the rejection, I decided not to let my draft peer review comments go to waste, so I posted them on PubPeer as comments for the published MDPI paper (which I've been calling the "victim" paper).  Unfortunately, the author is no longer with us, and unable to reply to my criticisms.

Reflections on the Incident

Several things went wrong here.

1. The MDPI journal should not have published the original paper.  It likely would not have passed peer review at the Springer journal where it was also submitted.  Moreover, according to Wikipedia, MDPI is a controversial publisher that has been suspected of being a predatory journal.  From now on, I will refuse to submit to, or peer review for, any MDPI journal.
2. The plagiarizer should not have picked such a terrible paper to plagiarize.  Chances of getting it published would be low, except at another predatory journal.  But what was the point of plagiarizing it in the first place?  Why plagiarize?
3. I strongly suspect that the Springer journal did not follow its own policy of running a plagiarism check on the submitted manuscript.
4. The peer reviewers should and did assume that the journal would follow its policies, and none of us attempted to check the manuscript for plagiarism.  Two of the three peer reviews therefore failed to detect the plagiarism, and the third one (me) did so but not deliberately; I stumbled upon the "victim" paper while trying to accomplish an unrelated task.

Peer review is a purely voluntary effort, and journals (including for-profit journals, such as was the case here) rely on the goodwill, skill, and effort of volunteers to perform a thorough manuscript review.  When reviewers are asked to review plagiarized manuscripts, it results in a colossal waste of time and energy.  Journals often have trouble convincing researchers to agree to review manuscripts, and when incidents like this occur, it decreases the reputation of the journal and creates resentment on the part of reviewers whose time was wasted.

Another note on scientist biography series

Previously I blogged about some biography book series featuring scientists, notably here and here.  The latter post mentioned the Blackwell Science Biographies series that migrated to Cambridge University Press, as well as a more general biography series at Oxford University Press (OUP) called Lives and Legacies, that has featured two physicists, Isaac Newton and Ben Franklin. 

Somehow I neglected to mention in my post on the Cambridge Companions series, that Oxford University Press has an Oxford Handbook of Newton currently in development.  Some of the chapters have been published online, and they look quite promising.

I recently learned of another Blackwell series, Blackwell Great Minds, that currently resides at the publisher Wiley.  Like OUP's Lives and Legacies, it is a very general series not focused on scientists.  However, I know of two scientists who have volumes dedicated to them:  Darwin and Newton.  (There is also a volume on Descartes.)  So it seems among the larger intellectual history culture, Darwin and Newton may be the most consequential scientists.  Both of them are represented in the following series:

• Cambridge Companions.
• Very Short Introductions (OUP).
• Cambridge Science Biographies.
• Oxford Portraits in Science.
• Blackwell Science Biographies (Wiley).

In addition, Newton is represented in the Oxford Handbooks series and the OUP's Lives and Legacies series.  He is even represented in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series!  (So are Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish.)  However the Bloomsbury Handbooks series features only one scientist I know of, Emilie du Chatelet (forthcoming later this month).