I would hesitate to call it "low standard".
However, I still find the concept interesting. If two scientists write a paper the journal may refer it to another two scientists to review it. On the other hand, if four scientists write a paper the journal still gets some more to review it. Same if ten scientists write the original paper. What is going on here? Why does it always take a few more than you thought?
Trevor is describing the ideal peer-review process of course. In practice scientists occasionally get caught reviewing their own work. So I guess they know who the reviewer is!
Alternatively, you can just make up the data and still get it approved like Diederik Stapel. and Dirk Smeesters.
Then there were the Ediacaran Animals. Something the consensus managed to ignore for 50 years or so. The fossils existed but they were the work of deniers so science chose not to believe it. It couldn't happen now, of course. We are talking about 1957 here.
Then there was Millikan and his oil drop electron charge experiment. He got a somewhat inaccurate answer and other scientists impartially replicated it. Well Millikan did get a Nobel prize fir it so he must be right, mustn't he?
Or as Feynman put it:
"It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..."
Then there is the trick of having a sympathetic editor delay a paper long enough to get another paper written rebutting it. Then you publish them one after the other. That way no rebuttal by the opposition is needed and if you point out areas of disagreement with the follow-up paper then they get the last word. Surely that could not happen?
Again, a sympathetic editor can prevent you from publishing a satisfactory reply. He can tell you that your reply needs to be shorter and shorter until it can't make all the points it needs to. Then he will publish knowing that an easy rebuttal will follow.
I will leave Dr Pat Michaels, Climatologist, with the last word: http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmicha...
Peer reviewing is a very helpful editing process before a research paper is published. It keeps certain aspects of research and papers out of published documents. These can be as minor as simple grammatical errors. More importantly, it addresses poor research methods or incomplete documentation.
What it does not do is block good research that is controversial or opposing to the status quo. The true power of published research is that other people can read it. If they think the paper is wrong then they can replicate the exact experiment and see what results they get, then draw conclusions from that. And this replication of experiments is done to nearly every paper.
If you recall "cold fusion" back in the day, there was a paper that passed peer review documenting that they had created energy using cold fusion. Then other scientists tried to redo the same experiment and no one could create cold fusion. Now that first paper has been debunked.
How could a peer review process possibly work if the referees weren’t experts in the subject matter – which is precisely what you’re proposing. If a new surgical procedure is proposed I’d like to think it had been reviewed by other surgeons, not by botanists, chemists and dieticians.
I’m guessing you understand nothing of the peer-review process. The whole idea is to test the robustness of the paper and for that the best referees are those who hold opposing viewpoints. I don’t want my papers being reviewed by people who will simply agree with them, I want to know what the weaknesses are, where ideas can be improved, where more work is required.
The process is completely anonymous, authors don’t find out who reviewed their papers. The decision on who referees them is taken by the journal editor who acts as co-ordinator and makes a decision whether to publish or reject a paper based on the feedback received. Often the papers that you assume are routinely approved come back with numerous recommendations. The editor takes the decision not to publish until the recommendations have been complied with.
Once a paper is published then it is there for the whole world to see, this is where anyone of sufficient competence can give their feedback and on a great many occasions there will be subsequent revisions and the release of further papers that incorporate the feedback received.
If you want to see the scientific process in action then dump the denialist propaganda websites that you appear to frequent and concentrate on the scientific journals and websites instead. This is where some of the real debate between experts – on both sides – takes place.
Problem is they do not do enough peer review. Climate science papers have lots of ad hoc statistical treatments that have not been published in the appropriate peer-reviewed statistical journals. The hockey stick controversy should have been dealt with easily. When Steve McIntyre submitted a rebuttal, Nature had Ian Jolliffe review it, and got an OK from him. Instead of publishing, they went out and added an extra reviewer to make a case for rejection.(Something about the audience is not interested). Ian Jolliffe made the sensible suggestion that instead of yelling louder, it shold be easy to have relevant people look at this.
Peer review does open debate to all fields of science. Turns out they all agree with global warming.
Peer review is the standard for all science.
no. experts are required to find fault in complex problems.
Peer review is nothing more than like minded people agreeing with each other. Imagine the Astrophysicist on the SETI project having a paper reviewed that stated there was no life elsewhere. A better standard would be to open up review to all scientific disciplines. This way the paper would be reviewed by other who didn't have the same built in bias that believed in so-called "global warming". Or is that the whole point?
