Stop deifying “peer review” of journal publications
I would like to add my two cents now – focusing on the exalted status some give to peer reviewed journal articles. I have three main concerns with this attitude which can be summarized as follows
1. Peer review is not magic
2. Peer review is not binary
3. Peer review is not static.
In general discussion, a peer-reviewed article is often a better citation than a mainstream/pop-sci article, but one has to acknowledge that peer-review simply means that some professionals have looked at it and found no (obvious) errors in the work. Mistakes can be made, things can be overlooked. Even without that, peer-review doesn’t mean the results are true. The full process of scientific inquiry means others have to replicate the work somehow, if it’s experiment, or test the work, if it’s theory. As the article says, this is a continual process, and as I’ve said before, every experiment is a test of the principles that underlie it.
The one thing that I prefer about peer reviewed articles over any other source of information is their tendency to contain actual substance. Wrong or right a peer reviewed article more often than not contains a much higher knowledge content and gives its reader something to digest. Most anything by Scientific American, including a currently posted thread on “Is Space Digital?”, simply does not state enough of anything to even make an opinion on the matter.
The only magic I see in peer review is that it requires its author(s) to deliberate on their topic in such a way as so their reader is capable of reviewing the content–for me this is quite the feature. When combined with a network of such statements one suddenly becomes capable of thinking on subjects in a way that can take years of experimenting off of their own target research. If anything is going to bring us forward as a species its going to be our capability to communicate ideas in the most effective, precise, and accurate method possible. How we go about establishing this line of communication is at this moment one of our most pressing issues and may even impact the future survival of our species.
The only thing surprising to me about the article is that anyone would firnd it surprising.
The purpose of peer review is to sort through submissions to journals and to weed out the obvious and obviously false. Hopefully the remainder is of interest to the community and free of at least the most obvious errors. What is ultimately published is of sufficient interest and importance to merit more careful reading and consideration, but there is no guarantee that it is correct.
There are, unfortunately, a very few journals established by the lunatic fringe in which “peer reviewed” articles of absolutely no scientific merit appear. When one’s peers are lunatics, even lunatics can publish “peer reviewed” papers.
Critical thinking is an important part of science, and peer review does not replace it or make it unnecessary once and article is put into print.
I think that it’s too easy to overestimate how much nonscientists understand about the details of how science progresses. They aren’t exposed to the actual process of peer review, so they don’t know what it entails.