Social Media and Scientific Journals

There have been rumblings of major changes in the way scientific journals peer review submissions.  Criticism of the current system has been growing for quite some time, particularly with respect to the lag time between when a manuscript is submitted and when it is published.  In the fast-paced world of modern research, by the time a paper is published - which can be many months after submission - it is often already out-of-date.  Some publishers have also faced criticism of favoritism, with lower quality papers being chosen over higher quality papers solely due to the name or affiliation of the author(s).

The first step towards a major paradigm shift in peer review has already occurred:  a social media network has been created by a group in Finland that is dedicated to reviewing manuscripts for publication in a Wiley journal.  Science Insider has a pretty good description of how the network functions and why it will be better than the current system, so I won't dwell on it.  But I will say that I'm still on the fence about this.  I think it's good that they're doing some cautious beta testing on one scientific journal, rather than instituting it widely right out of the gate, as it will allow Wiley to gather some valuable data, test the waters, and optimize the network before moving forward.  I'll definitely be keeping a close watch on this, because it represents a substantial change in the way peer reviewed journals select papers for publication.  And who knows?  It just might work.

Toot My Horn

My most recent manuscript submission has been published online. As I promised in a previous post to link to the paper on my blog, you can find the article here (probably requires a subscription). This paper doesn't include any mind-blowing discoveries, so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time hashing out all the details of the study. But here's a brief picture of what was done...

The paper is titled, "Comparison of molecular imprinted particles prepared using precipitation polymerization in water and chloroform for fluorescent detection of nitroaromatics." First off, I've described the process of molecular imprinting and how the molecular imprinted polymers work; you can find this information here if you'd like to know more. In essence, a molecularly imprinted polymer is a plastic material that starts as a liquid-phase precursor solution containing the template molecule that you want to imprint. When the material polymerizes, creating a rigid solid, the template is physically and chemically bound within the material. A chemical extraction process is then used to remove the template molecules within the material. This leaves behind binding sites in the polymer that, when re-exposed to the template, are able to specifically rebind the molecule. In this case, I used two different template molecules, TNT (the explosive) and its little brother DNT. Both of these compounds are nitroaromatics and are important in the detection of bombs, IEDs, landmines, etc.

For this study, I prepared the imprinted polymer particles using precipitation polymerization. In precipitation polymerization, the liquid precursor of the imprinted polymer contains an excess of solvent. When there is enough solvent, one section of forming polymer in the solution is unable to link up to another forming section of polymer in the solution because of all the solvent that is between them. Because of this, discrete particles of imprinted polymer are formed within the solution.

The selection of what type of solvent to use for this process is very important, as it determines how effectively the imprinted polymer binding sites will bind to the template molecule. In previous work, I experimentally determined that chloroform was the best solvent for imprinting nitroaromatic molecules. But here's the catch: molecularly imprinted polymers bind the template molecule best when they are exposed to the molecule in the same solvent that was used to form the imprinted polymer, and I wanted to expose the imprinted polymer to the template molecule in a water environment. So there's a trade-off going on. On the one hand, I already knew that chloroform was the most effective solvent for imprinting. But on the other hand, water would be the ideal solvent if I planned to expose the imprinted polymer to the template in water.

So I set out to compare the two solvents, chloroform and water, but a funny thing happened along the way. I used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images to look at the polymer particles and found that they were nothing alike. In the image below, (a) is the SEM of the particles produced in chloroform and (b) is of the particles produced in water. The images showed us that not only was the chemistry of the two polymers different because of the solvents, but the entire morphology was different as well.

To test which polymer would bind the TNT and DNT templates best, I doped the imprinted polymer particles with a fluorescent dye. When the template bound to the binding sites of the imprinted polymer, it would then quench the fluorescence of nearby dye molecules, which could be detected using a spectrometer. By carefully analyzing the data from these studies, I found that chloroform was the most effective solvent. This meant that the increased imprinting efficiency of the chloroform-based polymer was more important than using the same solvent for polymerization and rebinding. These results weren't much of a surprise, but they could be very beneficial for other researchers working in this field, as they can now refer to my paper rather than conducting this fairly time-consuming study on their own.

You Call That a Review?

I received reviewer comments back from a journal to which I submitted a manuscript last month. Overall, I'm fairly pleased because I think my paper is going to be inevitably selected for publication. I read over the reviewer comments and addressed the reviewers' concerns as I revised the manuscript. And that's when I noticed some striking differences between the comments of the two reviewers.

The first reviewer's comments went something like this: "The manuscript was well-written and study design is sound. Along with a few minor grammatical errors, I have several recommendations..." The reviewer then went on to point out that graphs could be redesigned to be more readable, and that some of the data could be modeled differently so as to be more clear and produce stronger conclusions.

The second reviewer, by contrast, barely pointed any of the paper's assets, deciding instead to use the brief comments section to criticize the manuscript. Normally, I don't mind critical reviews. In fact, I prefer them to overly doting comments, as it's difficult to better my writing without a strong critique. But in this case, 4 of the 5 reviewer comments were along the lines of "the authors should have performed a study that examined..." And then the reviewer proceeded to describe some specific experiment or study that was not at all within the scope of the manuscript. In fact, when I wrote my response to the reviewer comments, I had to point out three times that the studies described by the reviewer were beyond the scope of the current paper, but that they could possibly be the focus of future studies.

I've come across reviewer comments like these before. It sometimes seems as though a reviewer is simply trying to flaunt their intelligence, rather than actually supplying the author with any useful information. It's frustrating and it doesn't help make the manuscript better. So I may just be venting, but I'd also give this recommendation to any future journal reviewer: think about the scope of the manuscript and what information the authors are trying to convey with the results during the review process. Just because you think you're smarter than the authors doesn't mean you really are.