Some new insights about the peer-review process.


Last week, I reviewed a paper on IR imaging of bee colonies.  As some of you know, in 2011, we published the first detailed research study of the application of long-wave infrared imaging for assessing bee population size inside beehives.





Opt Express. 2011 Jan 3;19(1):399-408. doi: 10.1364/OE.19.000399.
 
Long-wave infrared imaging for non-invasive beehive population assessment.
 
Shaw JA1, Nugent PW, Johnson J, Bromenshenk JJ, Henderson CB, Debnam S.


The 2016 paper that I was asked to review, talked about how the investigators developed and produced visualizations of bee populations inside the box.  However, something seemed a bit familiar and a bit off.  
(Since the editor hasn't made a decision on my feedback, I'm not disclosing the authors, country, nor specifics of the paper.  Suffice to say, their innovation had to do with data visualization and processing, as one might expect.)


First, their custom built visualization technology seemed no better and is probably inferior to the free visualization software that comes bundled with contemporary IR cameras.  It definitely was inferior to the capabilities of top-end, after-market IR image visualization and thermal analysis software, available for purchase (although it is rather spendy).  However, I'm always looking for a better way to visualize the bee cluster and to automate data analysis.  


I'm not sure this was it.  So A for effort; F for re-inventing the wheel.  


Curiously, their lengthy introduction and rationale had little to do with their visualization and data analysis innovation. 


It all seemed really familiar, so I dug out our paper.  Yep, we made almost all of the same arguments for the potential usefulness of IR imaging with respect to bee management.  


Then I looked at their 2016 title.  Replace our long-range with two other words and you've got our 2011 Title.  Not sure in this case that I think the imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.


Maybe they missed our paper?  


Nope, it's in their References and it is cited in the Materials and Methods.


However, our paper is not cited for the work we did in developing the concept of IR imaging of beehives or for being the first to conduct extensive research work regarding IR imaging and data analysis.  Rather, there is only a simple statement that our article is where they found a visual inspection method for approximating bee colony population size based on frame (comb) coverage by bees.  


There's no mention of any of our IR work, nor that we coined the phrase 'non-invasive population assessments'.  Not surprisingly, there was also no mention of the four contemporary articles regarding IR imaging of beehives and reviews of current IR cameras that I've recently published from December 2015 through May  of 2016.


So, I'll see what the editor decides.  I'd like to think all of this was an oversight, but it smells wrong to me.  


Moving on, this morning, I got a request from the editor of another journal to review a review paper on  'sniffer bee technology'.   Dog's trained to find things by olfactory cues are sometimes called sniffer dogs.  
But, I've never observed a bee sniffing.  There's the problem of lack of a nose.  So, if anyone ever finds a sniffer bee, please let me know.  


Seriously, we've done a lot of work regarding conditioning of bees to search for things based on scent - we even patented the process.  We've also done a lot of work regarding thresholds of detection, what bees can detect, probability of detection (ROCs), etc.  So, forgiving the obvious error in the Title (which even I sometimes use, but then immediately point out why one may have sniffer dogs, but not sniffer bees), I was interested in their review.  


Once again, the article sounded rather familiar.  Not too bad a job, they spent a lot of time digging up papers.  I saw a lot of names of people I have and still work with, many of whom I actually contracted to work for or for them to work for me.  


Unfortunately, the authors never talked to me, so they didn't know about the interconnections.  Toward the end,  in their review there is a Table addressing the merits and limitations of each approach - kind of a GO TO Table for what to use and when.  Also, I found several References to some of our publications, although my last name was variably spelled, including listing me as Jerry B.  


What was NOT  in this review article was this reference:


Biosensors 2015, 5(4), 678-711; doi:10.3390/bios5040678

Bees as Biosensors: Chemosensory Ability, Honey Bee Monitoring Systems, andEmergent Sensor Technologies Derived from the Pollinator Syndrome
Jerry J. Bromenshenk1,2,* , Colin B. Henderson1,3,  Robert A. Seccomb1, Phillip M. Welch1, Scott E. Debnam1,2 and David R. Firth1,4

 
Yep, a year ago, we reviewed virtually everything that is in this 2016 review.  Plus we reviewed several technologies that these authors overlooked or ignored.


More importantly, we have extensive hands on experience in this field of study.  For example, these authors talk about LIDAR and its merits and limitations- but they apparently don't know that we have and use two, state-of-the art bee mapping LIDARS with decimeter resolution (it's in our review).  Their evaluation of merits and limitations of LIDAR and of all of the other sensor technologies are drawn solely from their reading of articles - from what I can determine, none of the authors has ever done any work in this field.  


It's one thing to read someone's paper on a subject, and it's all together another to have actually done it - especially in this area of emergent technologies that cross disciplines, combining bee behavior, ecology, chemistry, physics, electronics, mathematics, and both lab bench-top and field-based systems.  


That's one of the reasons that in our review we laid out a chronology of developments, a who did what and when, and then discussed the status of each technology.  We did NOT produce a GO TO Pick Table - these are still such new technologies that no one knows exactly how best to apply and where they may contribute the most.  In many cases, we've solutions looking for problems.  


These authors, apparently having never done any of this research or used these technologies are naive.  We all know that anyone publishing a paper puts their best data forward.  For example, what works on the bench-top may not work in the field.  


Developing and testing high technology instruments like LIDAR is not quick, cheap, or easy.  We spent 10 years before we finally had two really portable and useful instruments.  Cutting edge technologies continuously remind us, especially under field conditions, where time and weather interact, of Murphy's Law AND that Murphy was an optimist.  None of this is readily apparent in the published papers - but all of us who developed this technology know it all to well.  Our consensus about cutting edge technology - we find ourselves too often on the bleeding edge.


 So, I'm not sure what to do with this review paper.  I'm certainly going to ask the editor to ensure that our review is mentioned and cited - up front and center, not hidden at the end of the review.  And there are a couple of other reviews of particular technologies that these authors missed. Those need to be included.  


I'm not so sure the oversight here was intentional - sloppy yes.  Their review article might reach a different audience than ours did.  However, I'd want to be sure that the audience was pointed toward our review, that of Meikle, and some by other researchers.  And the authors need to at least interview some of the people whose work they cite.


Wonder what tomorrow brings?








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