Interview with Dr. Guido Fioretti—Winner of the Entropy Outstanding Reviewer Award
We are honored to announce that Dr. Guido Fioretti has been selected as the winner of the Entropy Outstanding Reviewer Award 2025.
The following is an interview with Dr. Guido Fioretti:
1. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your current research focus?
I am interested in the cognitive aspects of decision-making, both individual and collective. Concerning individual decision-making, I am particularly interested in the decision not to decide, by which I mean the state of cognitive disarray that occurs when causal relations unexpectedly fail. Concerning collective decision-making, I am particularly interested in transferring the concept of distributed, associative memory from networks of neurons onto networks of humans. I make use of agent-based models, neural networks, belief functions, and hypergraphs.
2. What was your first feeling when you learned you had received the Outstanding Reviewer Award? What does this award mean to you personally?
I am very critical of the practice of asking scholars to review academic papers for free. Unpaid work is a shame; in my opinion, publishers should pay scholars to do this job. Therefore, I highly praise MDPI for offering at least publication vouchers to reviewers. When I heard about this award, of whose existence I was unaware, my esteem for MDPI grew even higher. Vouchers and prizes are not an income, but they are the closest you can come to it.
3. What prompted you to become a reviewer for the journal Entropy?
I wanted to publish a paper in Entropy because I knew that only this journal had the kind of audience that could appreciate my paper. Since I do not have a lot of research funds, I offered MDPI to work as a reviewer in order to obtain publication vouchers.
4. In your opinion, how should a reviewer fulfill their role?
Reviewers should make an effort to escape from Max Planck’s observation that “Science proceeds from funeral to funeral”. Reviewers should help fellow scholars develop their research, even if they do not agree with it. Reviewers should abstain from principled or even ideological condemnation of their fellows’ work, providing constructive inputs.
5. How has reviewing others’ work informed or shaped your own research?
By reviewing papers for Entropy and other MDPI journals I discovered inventive, innovative, out-of-chorus research that does not have a chance to be published in so-called top journals. I very much regret that I do not have much time to review all the Entropy papers I would like to review because, beyond my initial aim to obtain vouchers, I discovered that it’s a great means to get in touch with innovative, original research.
6. What role do you think peer review plays in the academic ecosystem? What is the most easily overlooked value of reviewers?
Apparently, most editors assume that academics know the whole present, past and future of science. Therefore, the more the reviewers, the more accurate the selection of papers. Today, certain journals are proud of displaying 5 or even 7 reviews for each single submitted paper; but doesn’t it come to their mind that today’s scientists are ill-equipped to evaluate future science? Doesn’t anybody think that by increasing the number of reviewers one obtains nothing but conformity and science-as-usual? Stop the madness of increasing the number of reviewers, 2 are just enough!
7. In your opinion, what makes a review truly constructive and valuable for authors?
Stopping peers to re-invent the wheel. To be precise, I never met papers that re-invented the wheel completely, but I met several that re-invented some detail that would corroborate their main point. Telling these authors that that detail had already been conceived by X, proven by Y, and accepted by the whole community with the name Z was very helpful for them, because this helped them focus on the innovative content of their paper. It’s difficult to get published if your paper is innovative in too many respects, you should frame it as much as possible within current knowledge with one single innovative aspect standing out.
8. Based on your reviewing experience, what common issues do you often see in manuscripts, and what advice would you give to authors preparing their work for submission?
Lack of focus. Too many authors write 1 paper that entails so many issues that 2 or 3 papers could have been written in its place. In my opinion, this happens because everyone wants to rush to publish. However, my advice is to let your paper sleep in a drawer for some time, possibly months. When you open the drawer, you will find 2, or 3, or even 4 papers.
9. What advice would you offer to early career researchers who wish to become excellent reviewers in the future?
Check references, check quotations. Many of them are wrong, and you can only discover by reading the original source. This doesn’t happen—in my opinion—out of dishonesty, but simply because scientists re-interpret everything from their own point of view. Obviously, you also have a point of view, but by reading the original sources this will be your own point of view so you will be better able to offer some unconventional advice.
In my opinion, AI can do a lot in providing standard feedback. AI will be able (or, perhaps it is already able) to provide conventional reviews, the sort of received wisdom that everyone knows. This can be useful for authors, because they can foresee the most common objections without attending costly conferences. And it can be useful for editors as well, because if a human reviewer writes a text that says more or less what the AI says, then that review should be ignored.