A wisdom of wombats

A wise wombat, perhaps, but not a wisdom of wombats.

One of my editors wondered in a blog post about submitting a research paper to a journal just what collective noun might best fit a group of reviewers.  @pkennepoh suggested in a tweeted reply  a "murder" of reviewers.

Researchers who publish papers in academic journals have a fraught relationship with reviewers, in large part because we have seen the enemy and he is us. We are both the reviewed and the reviewers in turn.

Peer review is one way academic journals, particularly academic science journals, assess work submitted for publication. The reviewers, two or three, are chosen by the editor for their familiarity with the area of research, closely (you hope) read the work and offer their thoughts to the editor about the value of the work to the field, often its novelty. They are weighing the evidence presented to be sure it is sound. As a general rule, they aren't repeating the experiments. It mostly works.

Great peer reviewers push you to plug holes and sharpen the presentation of your arguments. Awful reviewers can be pedantic and ridiculous. You wonder if they read more than the title of the paper and your name.  Reviewer #2 is often caricatured as the reviewer asking that you cite their work (not so inadvertently revealing their identity) or demanding extra experiments or one more spectrum or climbing on their particular hobby horse regardless of its relationship to your work.

I've had fabulous reviewers, and one reviewer who simply stated that any computational work was nonsense (and in those days of pink carbon copy reviews, signed all the copies, then whited out his name.)  His, you say? His. I held it up to the window to find out who should never review my papers again.  And I had two papers which came back with "Accept without change." from all parties.

So what collective noun might I suggest for these anonymous clusters of colleagues - besides a murder of them? There are a boatload of "terms of venery" (collective nouns for groups of critters) to inspire. My favorites for reviewers:

a shrewdness (apes)
a bellowing (bullfinches)
a busyness (ferrets)
a siege (herons)
an unkindness (ravens)
an ambush (tigers)
and last but not least a wisdom (wombats)

But what I'm truly all in for?  a murmuration.  Applied to starlings, it comes from the Latin for murmurings or grumbling.  The murmurs of supports, the grumbles of the grumpy. It seems to cover it all.

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A video of a murmuration of starlings.
Photo is from Wikimedia, by JJ Harrison.