18 I have been asked recently by an editor at a fairly prestigious mathematics journal to referee a longish paper. I feel that there are many factors contributing to an overall difficult situation that I am not sure how to handle. I will try to be as detailed as possible without giving any identifying information. Effectively, this is a specialist journal which only publishes papers in one area of mathematics. However, this area is sufficiently expansive that it is not unusual whatsoever for two people identifying as researchers in the area to not only have no intersection between their work, but to be so far away from each other that they can't even tell the other what they are doing. The editorial board of this journal is comprised of experts from all over, and they specialize in different things. In this case, the paper I am asked to referee deals with two very different sub-areas. Arguably the main novelty of this paper is that it exists at all: that these two seemingly vastly disparate sub-areas can find common ground at all. Let us call the two sub-areas A and B respectively. The main ideas of the paper involving A are actually quite trivial. However, A is a very new sub-area with very few researchers, especially senior ones, who are familiar with it. Thus it is difficult to tell exactly what the landscape is, and how subjects in A compare with those in A', a much older and established sub-area. I have been asked to comment on this issue: specifically, how the main ideas involving A in the paper compare with ideas from A'. The main ideas of the paper involving B are even more problematic. Indeed, the author appears to be a total novice when it comes to B. Most of the manuscript is proving certain statements involving B, and while I cannot say I have read the arguments in detail, objectively these arguments seem quite unrefined for the following reason: after reading just the statement of their theorem, I was able to come up with an objectively better proof in a couple of hours. Without going into any mathematical details, I can back up my claim as follows: the proof that the author provides is very long, totalling over 40 pages. It is also conditional on a famous conjecture in mathematics. My proof, although I have not written it down, is fairly simple and I cannot imagine it being longer than 5 pages. Further, it involves no unproven hypotheses (so it is an honest-to-goodness proof). Thus, if the paper is cut into two parts, one consisting of A and the other B, both pieces would be very insipid and hardly worth one's time. Therefore the only reason why it would be considered to be worthy of publication in a highly selective journal is that it manages to weave these two areas together in an interesting way. However, this type of paper already exists in the literature (although there are only a few of them, since like I said sub-area A is very new). One of the things that give me pause is my own identity as a researcher: I happen to be one of a very small group of mathematicians who are both somewhat familiar with A and also an expert in B. In fact I dare say that there are only a handful of people in the world with a similar pedigree in this context. This makes me worried about my bias, since I no longer find such papers novel simply because it manages to use ideas from both A and B. Any advice on how I should proceed with the refereeing process? publicationspeer-review Share Improve this question Follow edited yesterday Ben Bolker 5,08111 gold badge2121 silver badges3434 bronze badges asked Dec 23 at 8:25 anonymousxanonymousx 57166 silver badges1414 bronze badges 2 6 Is "managing to use ideas from both A and B" the only argument for publication in the current journal? Doesn't sound like a convincing case to me. – Anyon Commented Dec 23 at 8:40 2 Refereeing articles shouldn't be a group project. The editor trusts you - you need to trust yourself – Scott Seidman Commented 2 days ago Add a comment  |