…a sacred cow ready to be slaughtered.
Richard Smith, who edited the British Medical Journal for more than a decade, said there was no evidence that peer review was a good method of detecting errors and claimed that “most of what is published in journals is just plain wrong or nonsense”.
You’re a little late to the party with this…Literally for 10 years I have been posting comments about this subject here…and taking relentless flak for my efforts
http://www.amazon.ca/The-Truth-About-Drug-Companies/dp/0375760946
baffle gab is what I have called it for 60 years or so.
But I thought that the Praetorian guard was the only way to go? Being close to the centres of power, of course they are eminently qualified to decide who should or should not lead / be published.
Consensus is the enemy of science.
As always, Retraction Watch is a good read:
http://retractionwatch.com/
Seems to be quite a bit of momentum to destroy the current paradigm, not just because so much peer review is actually neither, but that as one scientist says, journals get the papers written for free, then charge for them.
Ironic that this guy is a former editor of the BMJ, a major propaganda organ for the anti-gun crowd. I wonder how many of those he signed off on?
The medical literature is a joke in many respects. If a subject has the right PC credentials, no lie it too ridiculous or obvious for a medical journal to print.
The problem is that actual scientists are trying to get published as well, and their work is getting tarred with the same brush as social justice frauds.
Peer review assumes honesty on the part of the authors, the reviewers and the editors. This assumption is no longer valid. Sad, but true.
Peer review probably worked OK back when the entire enterprise of “science” was a fairly small shop, and the volume of work to be reviewed was relatively small. And when the majority of scientists actually were scientists, going where their research took them, and not activists with an agenda.
And the second article. A 1.5% excess in “jargon words” is the hallmark of a falsified paper? No way that measurement could go wrong. heh.
The problem is there is a big demand to publish but little demand to read the crap produced. Beyond reading a summary, seriously, who is going to invest a day or two reading and digesting a likely irrelevant study of outcome oriented research? A PhD student might read a particular study if it is close to his topic of research but, then again, he might not, especially if it interferes with his foregone conclusions.
Forty years ago I remember reading a summary of a paper presented by a respected business prof in the area of industrial relations. I don’t remember the specifics but it sounded like an elementary school solution to motivate a settlement in collective bargaining. As the guy was off the boat from the Punjab, my guess is he never had a lot of hands-on experience in bargaining other than – you work or you starve. My guess is a lot of research is simply made-up crap.