"extreme professionalism"

As a favour to a long-standing collaborator of mine, I recently (over the course of the past 18 months or so) acted as Associate Editor for a special issue of a peer reviewed journal which focussed on one of his projects with which I was not involved. This issue contained only 8 papers, but they involved virtually all active research groups across Europe on one particular research area. It was therefore extremely hard to find reviewers. For one paper, I ended up doing the review myself. The issue has now appeared, and in the editorial/acknowledgements I see the phrase "We would like
to thank Prof. X (me) who acted with extreme professionalism as associate editor for this Special Section".

A colleague mentioned that he was trying to work out whether this was a compliment or not and I confess I am not sure myself what is meant. I was thorough in tracking down reviewers and reading all their comments and making decisions appropriately and justifying these fully (even though this meant that the special issue took longer to appear than it might otherwise have done). I was also thorough in making sure the reviewers had no conflicts of interest. However, I'm not sure how much more professional I was than any others would have been. IN fact, since I am currently a co-editor of a different journal, and going through a heavy phase of reviewing articles, it made me feel slightly odd!

Recently I have seen two excellent guides to writing a peer-review, which made me feel guilty about the quality of peer reviews I have sometimes provided, and frequently seen. One is published by Elsevier.com and available at www.elseview.com/reviewers. Another is an article in the membership newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. The latter suggests 3 readings of the manuscript in total, but that a review can be written after then first one if the material is not publishable or has a major flaw which could be addressed. I wish I had time to read things that many times (although I often skim a manuscript before doing a detailed review). On occasion I have resorted to filling the review with structural and grammatical comments rather than deeply considering the science.

I resolve to treat others manuscripts as I would have someone treat my own in the future. If this means accepting less requests to review in order to do them more thoroughly, this will be ethical.