On October 28, 2009, I submitted a manuscript on “Quantitative evidence
for the persistence of the Ivory-billed
Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis)” to Avian Conservation and
Ecology along with
these figures and movies. On December 14, I received
these comments by the editor and reviewers.
In responding to the editor, I pointed out that Reviewer B
seemed to have a background in
flight mechanics, and in fact this reviewer has published extensively on
that subject. The editor inexplicably
dismissed this assessment by a leading expert in favor of a “very
thorough” review that is actually superficial and loaded with mistakes.
This version of the manuscript contains the
line numbers that are referenced by Reviewer A, who...
...thinks the standard deviations mentioned on line 107 are derived from Pennycuick’s model,
but standard deviations come directly from data — it’s hard
to imagine how a scientist in any field could not be aware of this basic fact
from elementary statistics.
...claims that Nudds et al. “showed that the predictive power of the
equations of Pennycuick starts to plummet...,” but they did nothing of
the sort.
...claims that Nudds et al. showed that “wingspan is as good
a predictor of wing-beat frequency as Pennycuick’s models” and that I should apply
their model, but it actually involves two parameters (wingspan and flight speed)
and it actually was applied in my paper (see Eq. 5).
...discusses semantics and other trivial issues while completely ignoring
the key technical details, such as the wingspan and flight speed estimates,
the wingtip curves that were extracted
from the video by an expert on woodpecker flight mechanics, the fact that the flap rate is more than ten standard
deviations above the mean flap rate of the Pileated Woodpecker, the fact that
evidence from two independent sources (the video and a historical photo)
suggests that there was a misconception about the flap style, etc.
...comments on how
to write a scientific paper — it’s a wonder that I somehow managed to publish
more than 70 scientific journal articles and serve nearly a decade on
the editorial board of
a
scientific journal without being aware of
“the established scientific paper structure.”
On December 29, I submitted a revised manuscript
that addressed the comments by the editor and reviewers. On February 8, the editor sent
additional comments that ignore the key
technical details, and it became clear that more than
three months of dealing with that journal had been a complete waste of time.