What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

107 cancer papers retracted due to peer review fraud.

5 Replies to “What Would We Do Without Peer Review?”

107 cancer papers retracted due to peer review?
What’s this? Is junk science metastasizing?
There must be a Trudeau Liberal grant to study this.
One waiting for an application… if you live in a Liberal held riding, of course.
But only, if there is any money left to hand out, after the Trudeau Liberals fund a
ummah (or is that Huma, as in Abedin?) size of grants to study Islamo-phobia.

But but but peer review is the gold standard by which all science is to be judged….. so says my liberal cousin. When I bring up any kind of scientific discussion with her the first thing she asks for is a peer reviewed study. She is completely incapable of understanding that peer review is meaningless at best and a scam to fool non scientists at worst.

I keep hoping that people will finally recognize how much our lives are being controlled by laws, regulations, and policies that were brought into place by well-intended people, but based on really, really bad “science”.

Theoretically, peer review is the best method for checking and approving publications. However, the research community tends to be intellectually root-bound and doesn’t know how to handle original ideas.
Legitimate skepticism, of course, is not only acceptable but expected. However, if one investigates something that’s not currently popular, one’s work is often given short shrift. There aren’t that many people who are familiar with whatever new concept that comes along and, thereby, can’t evaluate it. If it’s not popular, it’s of no interest to many reviewers and is often discarded because they can’t be bothered to figure it out, assuming they can do so in the first place.
Whether a paper is accepted for publication often depends on not just the topic but the affiliation of the authors as well. (I recall hearing about this on a CBC Ideas program more than 30 years ago.) If they’re from, say, Podunk College, the manuscript is quickly rejected. Why? The mentality is that if the authors were any good as researchers, they wouldn’t be at that institution but at a big-name university or large corporation.
Then there’s the aspect of money. The splashier and fancier the way by which the data for a paper is obtained, the better. That’s because it means one had lots of money to spend on equipment and staff. More funding increases one’s status as a researcher, though this may not necessarily be an indication of one’s abilities.
But, in order to get that funding, one has to demonstrate that one is worthy of receiving it. One way to do so is to show one’s publication output. In my experience, I doubt that many reviewers of grant applications ever bothered to look at, let alone read, many of the papers that are listed.
Also, if one has an established reputation, one’s chances of getting a paper accepted for publication increases as well. After a while, one’s name alone would be sufficient and the actual content of a manuscript is of lesser concern. The idea is that once an investigator has demonstrated that they can do good research, anything that they produce after that would be automatically as good, if not better.
Really? Soon after I started grad studies many years ago, I read some papers written by my supervisor at the time. By playing shell games with some data by dividing it into different sets, and mixing and matching them, he produced several publications which were OK instead of a really good one. Grant application reviewers and, for that matter, his superiors at the university would be led into believing that he was being quite productive.
Sadly, the peer review system consists of a lot of bafflegab and BS, cleverly disguised by smoke and mirrors. That’s one reason why many researchers walk away from it.