H
hecd2
Guest
Peer review is the means by which the scientific community controls the quality of published papers. Scientists have to build on the work of others, which they mainly access through papers in established journals. No scientist has the time or the expertise to quality control every paper he or she reads – if good work was not separated from the reams of poor, cranky and downright mendacious stuff that people seek to publish, then little progress would be possible – the community would be unable to build up a body of quality research in which we can place our confidence.
Peer review is not perfect – there have been some very high profile failures (almost all involved papers being published that should not have been published), and there are various alternative approaches including the unrefereed on-line publication of pre-prints, particularly in the astronomy, physics community on the arXiv server, and the use of open web-review with which a couple of new biology journals are experimenting. But formal peer review or refereeing remains the primary means for ensuring quality and eliminating error, crankery and fraud from the scientific literature.
Sullivan’s paper makes some relevant points, but Sullivan is not a scientist and Sullivan’s article relies almost entirely on assertion – it is not supported by much evidence of improper suppression of valid scientific ideas. As I have said, the peer review process has occasionally failed to filter out egregious blunders but, on the other hand, there is little or no evidence that peer review has been a barrier to progress by suppressing radical warranted findings for any length of time. It might well be that some papers on plate tectonics were refused publication in the early days, and Marshall and Warren’s work on H pylori and stomach ulcers took a long time to be accepted (although, they weren’t actually denied publication – Marshall’s experiment deliberately infecting himself was published in an Australian medical journal), but it’s hard to think of substantial cases in which peer review has a been a long term barrier to new thinking. On the contrary there are endless cases in which scientific claims that were published without peer review were later shown to be baloney. Young Earth Creationists and proponents of ID hate peer review because they can’t get their ideas through it and into reputable journals, but that is because their ideas are devoid of scientific merit.
There are also some vocal opponents of peer review from within the academy, but very few or no ideas for how to make a better arrangement for separating the scientific wheat from the chaff.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
