ABSTRACT
It is interesting to consider the process by which the review of Cowan (2001) was accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. That journal has a special mission in publishing theoretical reviews that are controversial and therefore are good topics for commentary. Many short commentaries are published after every “target article,” along with the author’s reply to the commentaries. When I first submitted my manuscript, many of the peer reviews came back with the comment that this was a good summary of results on capacity limits, but that it was not especially controversial. This sort of review could have resulted in an editorial action in which the article would be rejected, with advice to submit it to a more conventional journal that did not specialize in controversy. However, of the eight or so reviewers of the original manuscript (many more reviewers than most journals use), one or two did not at all trust my theoretical analyses. Most importantly, Herb Simon suspected that I rifled through the literature looking for the number 4. Because of the minority of commentaries of this nature, the article was controversial enough for the journal.
