I never learned peer review as anything more than others in the field reviewing the paper and confirming it meets standards. Its like logic vs truth. Peer review is like proofreading. Is the structure of the experiment proper. Is there controls. Is the statistical analysis proper. so on and so forth. Honestly though science is dependent on replication which used to be a sort of competition so it worked. Oh you think this is this and this is how you proved it. Well I will see for myself and I will lambast you if it does not work. It was kinda personal with the field before modern times. Competition was very direct. Now no lab wants to do anything but something they can say is new and a discovery. I feel at least 50% of public science funding should be for experiment replication
Sounds like maybe you learned about it from some kind of actual education, not just reading about it on social media. That's cheating.
It's a numbers game.
- X submits paper to Journal 1, and peers A,B,C reject it.
- X submits paper with minor changes to Journal 2, and only peers D and E reject it.
- X submits paper with minor changes to Journal 3, and only peer G rejects it
- X submits paper with minor changes to Journal 4, and no one rejects it.
Journal 4 increments prestige, Scientist X increments prestige, but nothing true or good is actually gained.
Science.
there are a couple journals where peer review means the former. one that i can think of is Organic Sytheses orgsyn.org
The ones that fail peer review go from "unexpected result" to "the fuck were you actually doing?!?"
Never,
It’s peer review not peer verified.
English is my second language so I don’t get this post, it always meant someone else read it.
Agreed. Reviewing literally means just reading and making comments
I think to some of us a review is seen as a verification of veracity.
I honestly always mistook peer review as OPs post so I guess I was 37 when I learned that...
When I have reviewed IT system design changes, my favorite comment for correct-looking changes has been "looks good, I look forward to seeing whether it works"
Thank the greed. Even bad results should be kept. It's still knowledge. To get closer to a goal, many mistakes are made and we have to learn from them. Using the scientific method to find out that something does not work is still valuable.
This is a lesson I try to teach my kids every day. When they get upset they can't do something, I ask, "well whatd you learn?" And sometimes it's as simple as "that didn't work." Other times they think for a second they try something new.
Failure is a learning opportunity. Take advantage if it.
I recently read an interesting article proposing to get rid of the current peer review system: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
The argument was roughly this: for the unfathomable (unpaid) hours spent on peer review, it's not very effective. Too much bad research still gets published and too much good research gets rejected. Science would also not be a weak-link problem but a strong-link problem, i.e., scientific progress would not depend on the quality of our worst research but of that of our best research (which would push through anyway in time). Pretty interesting read, even though I find it difficult to imagine how we would transition to such a system.
I'm just happy they learned what peer review means. I doubt even a third of Americans know what it means or its impact on their lives
Wait deadass?!?!? If so then 20 lol
Best part is the reviewers don't get paid for their work, the publishers pocket all of the money they get from selling journals
While charging researchers to publish the paper and the reader for accessing it. If they can get away with it. It's a fucking scam, thus arxiv and others exist.
What did you think the "review" part of it meant other than reviewing it?
They thought the review process was more arduous than looking at some newly discovered scientific fact that no one had ever known before and saying “yeah that seems self-evident.”
If you feel like that’s reductive, now you know why I felt like responding
In my field of research, there seems to be a recent push for artifact evaluation. It's a separate process which is also optional but you get to brag about the fact that you get badges if your experiment results were replicated.
There's also some push back against this since it's additional work, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
So it's like a crowd strike code review
Scientists can get really petty in peer review. They won't be able to catch if the data was manipulated or faked, but they'll be able to catch everything else. Things such as inconclusive or unconvincing data, wrongful assumptions, missing data that would complement and further prove the conclusion, or even trivial things such as a sentence being unclear.
It generally works as long as you can trust that the author isn't dishonest
A LOT of things work without safety nets if people engage honestly.
The problem, with FAR more than science, is many, many people are distinctly NOT honest.
I do trust scientists about peer review more than code reviews. This is how I imagine the crowd strike reviewer.
Damn I guess I was today years old. I remember in high school chemistry class we were taught about peer review and had to do it for each other, except the way we did was actually testing and replicating results, so that cemented the misconception.
In my field, peer review was "obviously hasn't read enough Foucault".
Was lucky to contribute to a paper for the first time recently and was certainly suprised to see what peer reviews looked like lmao
Is it better or worse than code reviews in programming? Typically, if it's 5 lines, we scrutinize everything. If it's 500 lines, it's a quick scan with a "looks good" comment.
I'd say its similar. Though from the limited dataset of peer reviews I have, I'd say that peer reviews are more informative / detailed while code reviews usually have way less typos lol.
LGTM!
This is why I always shake my head and dudebros saying "Naw bro it is/is not peer reviewed, so it's bullshit!"
Even though there are many times when the peer was wrong or outright lying to protect their pre-conceived notion or pet theory... but if you just call that the "Galileo Gambit" you don't have to take that seriously...
