In the past half year, I got back some supposedly anonymous peer reviews for an article where a peer reviewer in the first round had tried to sabotage the project (probably because I'm obviously right, and they'd tried to put their hand to the notorious field-problem before, to no avail).
And, these new peer reviews you could work with, but they were still shocking. You could totally tell who wrote them, and although I’d previously categorized these people as better people in the field, there was still some pretty glaring eccentricities in thinking, as well as the use of widespread but poorly-grounded operative categories that they simply weren’t questioning, but instead rotely repeating as obvious touchpoints.
And, these are the good ones.
Like, what the f*ck is up with this field that I’ve been dabbling in, with the one ancient language that I’ve made myself into quite the expert in over the past number of years?
Honestly.
The quality of scholarship is just very bad, although I often charitably call it “uneven.”
I really don’t understand what these people do all day, since they certainly don’t seem to be solving major unresolved issues in scholarship.
