A few more examples:

A journal contacted me about being a "guest editor", which proved to
mean that I would be responsible for the peer review of a particular
paper.  I contacted a couple of people who I knew were knowledgeable
about the particular mollusks that the paper was about.  I and they
read the paper, and I sent all the comments back to the authors.
After a bit of further revision back and forth, the paper was sent on
to the publisher.

Sometimes, of course, a reviewer is off base, and the editor then
needs to exercise judgement.  I've gotten some less than helpful
comments back (e.g., "doesn't know the literature"-I can easily
believe that I missed something, but unless you tell me what
literature I don't know, I can't fix the problem.)  There's also the
problem of whether the reviewer knows all of the relevant issues,
especially if a paper deals with several different aspects of science.
 There's always the trick of going to a journal that you think will be
more sympathetic or less alert.  For example, Hannibal's 1912 paper on
western North American mollusks was widely suspected of being sent to
a British publication because U.S. journals would be more familiar
with the fauna and issues relating to it.   Peer review isn't perfect,
but it helps.

--
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"

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