Hitler attempts to navigate the peer-review process

Anything that inspires a good angry rant in real life can be turned into a Downfall video.

Getting a peer reviewed research paper through the aforementioned review process can be a stressful, rant-inducing experience. Remember, in order to be published, the paper is read by three (usually anonymous) reviewers who work in the same field of science. They judge things like whether the experiments described in the paper were done well enough, whether the work is original, and whether the take-away conclusions the scientist is presenting match up with the results of the experiments.

Last year, I wrote up a longer piece explaining peer review in more depth. Give it a read, and then see if you're surprised that there are multiple versions of peer review Hitler.

Above, Hitler is having problems with the third reviewer on his peer review board. Below the cut, Hitler's grant proposal is rejected by the National Institutes of Health.

Thanks to Steven Ashley for opening the wormhole on these science-based Hitler videos for me!

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: downfall • Hitlers • lol • peer review • Science

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http://twitter.com/roelsiebrand Roel Siebrand

I think I’m quite done with this now. As far as I’m concerned the best one was done by LuckyTV for Dutch television and I think, but not quite sure, the first too. Can we stop now?
- Guido
  
  Why?
  
  Stop watching them. It was hilarious, I enjoyed it, as a scientist used to hear these rants.
  
  The world is full of stuff you don’t like. Life is short, why not devote the time to things you love and let everybody else have fun?
  - http://twitter.com/roelsiebrand Roel Siebrand
    
    You have a point. Thankfully there’s a zillion things I like but this is getting boring.
kateling

The number of peer reviewers depends on the journal. All the major journals in my field use only one referee, though fancy ones like Nature use three.

Three would be good for the science, but having all papers reviewed by three people would triple an already significant time burden.
http://www.mikezed.com mzed

Yeah, if I ever meet that “reviewer #3″ in person we’re going to have words.
Shinkuhadoken

What? You mean scientific discoveries aren’t determined by a prefabricated leftist political agenda in a attempt to secure meaningless government expenditures at the taxpayers’ expense to suppress capitalism and religious beliefs?

Could Fox News have lied to me?
mesocosm

I may be in the minority here, but I thought Der Untergang was not only a great film, but an important and culturally significant one. I think it’s a shame that it’s become a big ol’ joke, and a long-stale one at that.

But hey – Hitler! It’s hilarious I guess.
- http://www.mikezed.com mzed
  
  I’m not convince that this meme diminishes the original film, although I do agree that it’s quite stale. The director seems amused:
  http://www.vulture.com/2010/01/the_director_of_downfall_on_al.html
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  Actually, from my experience, the meme made more people aware of the film and how great it is.
franko

man, hitler is even hilarious ranting about stuff i have ZERO knowledge about or interest in. i don’t care what the haters say — i’m always good with a good “pissed-off hitler” video.
http://www.mulvany.net/ Ian Mulvany

This is a significant problem, and for early stage researchers in the life sciences getting a publication in a top tier journal can make or break their career. I’m working on developing a new journal that will balance very high impact with a respectful editorial process. We are going to have one active researcher who will act to coordinate all the reviews, and return a single letter to the author. There will also be a first round quick submission where we hop to be able to give a decision within a few days, in order not to waste the time of authors. We are backed by the Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Centre. Oh, yeah, we are also going to be publishing CC-BY, pushing the full XML journal content to as many places as possible (pubmed central, github, anywhere we can think really). Our managing editor is Mark Patterson who used to run PLoS, you can check it out at http://www.elifesciences.org, open for submissions in a few weeks :)