B

Oh, I did not know that. I have been doing it wrong all these years then. Could have been drinking cocktails on the beach instead of reading all these papers.

I am sorry, but what is wrong with your professor? You were doing exactly what you are supposed to do in a peer review. You should go look for things that are wrong or should be improved and only if the paper can withstand that process, it should be published. Only providing positive comments is really harmful to the scientific process and, in the end, to society.

To be honest, I think I reject more than half of the papers that I review. The rest require major or minor revision. It is not that I have a target or anything for how many I need to reject, it is just that most papers are of such low quality that I cannot do anything else. I think the number of papers I reject is quite normal in my field.

So, not all your comments need to be positive. If there is reason to be positive, you should mention it. And your comments should be constructive and respectful, but definitely not always positive.

In the case you are describing where the authors seem to only have read the titles of the papers, I would definitely reject. This is fraud. You are saying you did a literature study and you did not. So, I would be quite clear about that. I would also be a bit angry that they wasted my time. So, in my opinion, that is how a reviewer should respond in this situation, not with only positive comments.

N

We already have it in the Netherlands and I think it is a good thing. I know several people who chose for assisted dying when they were terminal and I think it protected them from a lot of unnecessary suffering.

There are some laws in place to prevent abuse. For example, there is a second, independent doctor assessing the situation to make sure conditions are really met and that someone is really terminal and deciding this from their own free will. The patient should be able to reconfirm that they really want to get euthanised before it happens. I think this is a good thing, but sometimes it is difficult when people with dementia clearly have stated and written down officially that they want assisted dying in certain circumstances, but they are not able to reconfirm because they lost their ability to understand.

In some cases you can have assisted dying when you suffer psychologically without any outlook of improvement (i.e. you have tried all treatments etc). However, there are waiting lists for those, which are quite long. My sister was on such a waiting list because she had anorexia. However, she died from starvation before she could be assessed. I am still a bit in doubt whether it would have been a good idea for her to get assisted dying. I still was hoping and thinking that there could be ways for her to get better.

Maybe the doctor assessing whether she would be approved for this would have thought the same, maybe not. She died anyway, so maybe I was wrong. In any case, I am not completely against euthanasia in case of psychological illness, as people can suffer from that equally as from physical ailments. However, you should be extremely careful and it should be extremely clear that there is no other solution at all anymore.