Why Academic Journals are Unreadable: The Referees' Crucial Role

In “Strategies for a Publish or Perish World” [Remus, W. 1977. Strategies for a publish or perish world. Interfaces8 (1) 64–68.], I explored the role of authors in making journals unreadable—how to write unreadable articles sure to be published. Scott Armstrong in this issue (p. 80) supports a central thesis of that paper by showing a business journal's prestige to be directly related to how unreadable it was. But did I have a surprise awaiting me. Soon after “Strategies” was published, I was deluged with letters from academics who served as referees (all letters were anonymous, of course). They berated me for my neglect of their crucial role in making journals unreadable. They suggested that Management Science and Operations Research are much more unreadable than Interfaces and Harvard Business Review due mainly to their gallant efforts. This is my attempt to make amends for that terrible oversight by bringing to public light the referees' cleverness and subtlety.