Virginia Gewin provides some pointers for rookie reviewers of papers submitted to technical journals. With career-hungry postdocs doing much of the refereeing, there’s little room for the purported conspiracies that cover up inconvenient research results.
Astronomy journals are generally comfortable with papers being revised several times, says Chris Sneden, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s rare, but a paper can go through five or six review rounds if it starts out as a disaster,” he says. “But the sociology of the field is happy with a lot of back and forth with the author during the process.”