Professor Idan Segev, an Israeli neuroscientist, had spent hours on his latest paper before he submitted it to a journal, hoping it would be published. When the reviewers’ comments came back, they were not entirely promising.
“This is gobbledygook,” said one.
Not once but twice, Segev and his co-author Dr Felix Schürmann were asked to redraft their paper, which described a landmark effort to create a computer model of the human brain. Finally the reviewer — Amy, aged 11 — approved the text. “Now I understand it,” she said.
This is the editorial process for one of the world’s most unusual journals, where senior researchers, including several Nobel Prize winners, have their work “peer reviewed” by children.
The journal, called Frontiers for Young Minds, is the brainchild of Robert Knight, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. He was motivated, he explained, by how difficult it can be for non-specialists, including well-informed adults, to penetrate scientific jargon.
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The children are paired with mentors who are often postgraduate students. They then read draft versions of papers written by senior scientists who have tried to make them suitable for children. The young reviewers point out where improvements could be made. They do not hold back. “This seems important but the way it is written is so boring I can’t get to the end,” said a 12-year-old reviewer recently of one particularly dry submission. “Could the authors maybe sound excited about what they’re doing?”
Knight said there were three worthwhile payoffs. “The kids are empowered because people are listening to their opinions, while the mentors fulfil their desire to do public outreach and help the next generation,” he said. “And the authors, bless their souls, actually have to write something that a human being could understand.”
One scientist to brave the process is Professor Ben Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who won the 2016 Nobel prize in chemistry. His panel of reviewers included Sankeeth, 15.
The paper described Feringa’s work on tiny “molecular machines” including the world’s smallest car, a device the size of a molecule. Sankeeth said: “The images could have been a bit more understandable, so I mentioned that, and there were some sentences I didn’t understand.” Overall, though, he thought the article was pretty clear.
Feringa said: “Not all my articles are evaluated so positively. And I was amazed by the quality of the reviewers’ questions and the remarks.”
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He agrees with Knight that science has a communication problem. “We should do much more to make our work clear to the general public, to politicians — to everybody who does not have a science background,” he said.
It seems that even scientists find the child-targeted papers useful. Another contributor to Frontiers for Young Minds was Professor Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry for her work on Crispr-Cas9.
After Knight read it, he realised he previously had not grasped some of the nuances of the gene-editing tool. “I thought I knew what Crispr was about,” he said. “And then I read the kids’ paper and I realised that I didn’t completely understand it.”
