In my youth, having been a dumpee a few times, I speculated that it was much easier being on the dumping side, since you knew it was coming. When catapaulted into the opposite position, I realised that being dumped is, in fact, considerably simpler, since you didn't know it was coming.

Why do I mention this, you ask? Every so often I'm asked to review papers for academic journals, and until today I've never had cause to recommend a rejection... and for some reason I feel rather bad about doing so. But then, we can't be accused of falling standards now, can we?

[rab] It's what publishers have to do all the time, but still not pleasant to be in the judgement seat. Do you know, or are you likely to meet, this person?

It's not nice to be negative, but then you can't reward bad work, can you?

Or you could reject another - as two negatives make a positive!

[rab] You'll get over it. Consider it a necessary herd-thinning.

[rab] Count yourself lucky that the editors are sending you such good papers. In my field at least, rejection rates in the top journals run 90-95% or so. I certainly have to recommend rejection much more often than acceptance.

[rab] It's positively a public service to see that rubbish doesn't reach print. In the past I've rejected several papers for triviality, several for technical slipshoddery, one for outright crackpottery, and one for unwittingly reproducing (but not as well) some of the results from a certain fundamental paper that hardly anyone has read but everyone cites (including the authors of the rejected paper). I assume your refereeing process is anonymous?