I know I should probably keep schtum, but I can’t help it. A paper came across my virtual desk the other day that’s got Instant Classic written all over it.
Without giving anything away, it’s a genuinely new and startlingly simple insight into a problem that’s been perplexing people for ages; backed up by a novel, simple and apocalyptically powerful new technique; written like a dream; and from (now get this) a single author.
I’m bound not to say any more. Indeed, I might have said too much. But this is one of those papers that gave me gooseflesh and threw my editorial spidey sense into fibrillation; one of those lightning-from-a-clear-sky manuscripts that as an editor I have the opportunity and privilege to be able to read and review perhaps once in a decade, and make me feel glad to be able to do the job I do.
When I look at a manuscript and can’t decide whether I should send it to review or not, I ask myself one question, in particular: does this manuscript have the potential to make me see the world in a completely new way? This one does. Oh boy, it does.
I think I’ll have to lie down, now, in a darkened room.
You’re going to be so disappointed when the referees explain that it’s totally wrong.
I do think it’s wrong of you to put clues to the identity of the paper in your tags. I think I even worked out who the author is.
Damn. Foiled again. The title of the paper is Decadal oscillations in the incidence of beachwear among golden retrievers with gingivitis and threadworm, by H. Dog
The Author, yesterday (by permission of Science News)
You forgot the rubella.
Well, I wasn’t going to mention the rubella, as I thought it might be indiscreet. People might get hurt (especially me).
Did the Golden Retriever get gingivitis from doing the dusting? Reminds me of a friend’s Doberman, who used to steal my horse grooming brushes and leave them at the far reaches of the paddocks.
The tags on your posts make me laugh…they’re like Dadaist word-collage. Though perhaps they have a deeper meaning, and I’m just missing it.
Did the Golden Retriever get gingivitis from doing the dusting?
No. She’s a very house-proud dog, though, in her own highly entropic fashion.
The tags on your posts make me laugh…they’re like Dadaist word-collage. Though perhaps they have a deeper meaning, and I’m just missing it.
Thank you! I do them to accord with my external image of being a carbuncular old curmudgeon. I don’t think there is a deeper meaning, though if you find one, you will let me know, won’t you? On the other hand, as H. P. Lovecraft once said, if the Laws of the Universe are kind, they will never be found.
I will be sure to look out for single-author papers in Nature from now on – what’s the ETA of this paper?
Don’t ring us …
Ooh, ooh, send it to me to review!
By the way, do all the paleontology papers pass before you, or only the biology ones? Or do all the editors see everything that will go in that week’s edition?
Lots of questions here, Heather. The subject area dealt with by any particular editor tends to be rather fuzzy at the edges. I was a palaeontologist in a former life, so I always get the palaeontology. But I handle quite a lot of macroevolutionary stuff, too, as well as evolutionary developmental biology, old-fashioned zoology and botany, and basically, anything with taxonomy or systematics in it. So I get to stick my two cents into all sorts of papers, from community ecology to archaeology to genomics. Even a few things that are completely molecular. It’s good, honest work. I like it.