What’s wrong with Peer Review? Actually quite a bit.

Posted by gcuppan

June 5, 2010

I continue to follow conversations on other blogs and web sites where people are talking about peer review. Here’s the link to a very interesting paper by Michael Nielsen: “Three myths about scientific peer review” that is definitely worth the read. Another article I suggest you check out is by Alison McCook and published in The Scientist: Is Peer Review Broken? In particular, please read the section titled The Religion of Peer Review where McCook expands on our argument that an abundance of data from a range of journals suggests peer review does little to improve papers.

So the question I have to pose then is “given the lack of evidence that peer review works, then why do so many scientists in the life sciences remained joined at the hip to the notion that review really makes for high quality publications?”.

Improving Review Practices

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