My wife has had numerous papers rejected because the reviewer belonged to a competing lab. Took a few tries and a request to exclude a certain reviewer and hey presto! published!
My wife has had numerous papers rejected because the reviewer belonged to a competing lab. Took a few tries and a request to exclude a certain reviewer and hey presto! published!
Were these open reviews? Many times they are blinded, so unless they revealed their identity, you would not know.
When the number of people is small enough, it's not too hard to figure out the identity of supposedly anonymous people.
I've done that once in an anonymous chat group with about 35 people in it.
That is despicable behavior from a professional. How common is this in academia?
Hard to say but my impression is that most academics are honest and would try not to do this, but also there are rivalries between labs and that tends to encourage "everything they do is bad and we're great" mentalities so it's definitely not surprising.