Laughter through tears: Unprofessional review comments as humor on the ShitMyReviewersSay Twitter account

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of public tweets posted on the ShitMyReviewersSay (@YourPaperSucks) Twitter account. The focus is on the content of recontextualized extracts from peer reviews, as well as the formal properties and the socio-pragmatic functions of the sharing practice on Twitter. The examination of a corpus of tweets (n = 397) yields several types of unprofessional review comments which correspond to the academic users’ rationale for sharing them publicly. The most frequent type of review comment is the aggressive one (n = 277), which harshly communicates negative evaluation, quite often in a creative manner (n = 91). This trenchant criticism, also when creatively formulated, represents purposeful acts of impoliteness. Whether or not originally intended to be wittily humorous, review comments publicized on Twitter, prototypically via Tumblr, display humorous potential, which may be boosted through the use of additional verbal commentaries and GIFs. Thus, situated in a different participation framework, the reported review comments are decontextualized and recontextualized in order to be publicly ridiculed and/or disparaged. Thereby, academics engage in solidarity-building, affiliative humor experience, which also gives them a sense of psychological relief.

‘Great work folks!’: establishing interpersonal communication in transparent peer reviews of research articles

“…however, as reviewer reports are easily accessible now with the introduction of transparency in review reports by journals like Nature Communications, we assumed that exploring the transparent communication between authors and reviewers would offer valuable insight for all the parties involved. In line with the nature of peer review and earlier research on traditional single-or double-blind reviewing (kourilova, 1998;Fortanet, 2008;Silbiger & Stubler, 2019;Dynel, 2020;hyland & Jiang, 2020), a high level of criticism can be expected. however, we conjectured that a high level of politeness would dominate reviewer reports, relying on the findings reported by Nobarany and Booth (2015) on open, signed peer review, which can be considered as a transparent approach.…”