On 26 Oct, 13:12, Roy Lewallen wrote:
QST editors can't be expected to be experts on all the topics they have
to deal with. Over the years, they've dealt with the problem in various
ways. One was to establish a pool of "Technical Advisors" -- volunteers
who had particular expertise in various areas. Some manuscripts being
considered for publication were sent to the appropriate TAs for comments
and review. This practice slowly died out, but I don't know why. I
suspect it was because the editors seldom had the time for this step in
the process due to erratic scheduling.

Eventually, they adopted a solution which was easy on the editors and
their schedules: post the proposed articles to a restricted web site
where the TAs could review them and leave comments. This saved the time
of communicating with individual TAs, and made it unnecessary to wait
for a response -- if comments weren't there by the deadline, too bad.
What I saw as one problem with this approach was that comments and
analyses were regularly being made by TAs whose appointments had nothing
at all to do with the subject matter. As an example (not representing
any actual particular occurrence), a TA whose expertise was, say, legal
matters or publicity would review (for technical content) an article on
phased arrays. As far as I could tell, their reviews were weighted
equally to those from people who really understood the topic. In any
case, the one or few reviews from knowledgeable people were generally
lost in the noise. I don't know if this is the method still being used
-- I resigned my TA appointment several years ago when it became
apparent that I was no longer able to make any substantial contribution.
I know of at least a couple of very knowledgeable people who have done
likewise. This is a shame, because they're perfectly willing to provide
free technical assistance, yet the ARRL doesn't seem able to find a way
to take advantage of it.

I'm not sure they've ever solved the problem of editors who don't
understand the material modifying it in such a way as to make it no
longer true. In all cases but one when this happened to me, I was able
to correct the problems before publication. In one case, however, I
wasn't given enough time to correct the numerous misinterpretations,
invalid "explanations", and other seriously wrong modifications made by
the editor and had to pull the article(*). Several extremely capable
people I know, however, have had serious errors introduced to their
articles by the editor *after their final review*, so they didn't even
get to see the errors until the article was published under their name.
Most of these people will never write for QST again as a result. This is
one of the reasons that QST has a smaller pool of knowledgeable and
capable authors to draw from.

So when you see a technically weak article in QST, the author might not
be entirely at fault.

(*) I want to make it clear that I'm very aware that my writing and
communicating skills aren't all that great, and I really appreciate
having an editor improve the style, clarity, and brevity of my writing,
as well as questioning any weak or inconsistent arguments I've made. [A
good editor would have cut half the words from the preceding sentence,
and made it a lot clearer at the same time.] So I welcome editing. What
I do object to is editing which changes the core meaning of the content
and/or results in its being technically incorrect.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

But "experts" are usually diehards and unwilling to
accept, analyse, or review change.
Can you imagine some of the "experts" on this group
having a hand at what should be printed and what was hogwash?
Maybe it is time to govern science by the polls.
Art