WORDS 15 PEER REVIEW
WORDS 15 PEER REVIEW
Peer Reviewing does not - does not, I repeat -comment on the 'truth-value' of an article.Peer review is a form of censorship, informal it may be, sometimes done with the best of intentions. It merely indicates that two or three experts, two or three only, whose identity is kept secret, and who are chosen by a commissioning editor behind closed doors, have declared some piece of research to be worthy of public debate. That is all.
You will hear pseudo-intellectuals like George Monbiot use this term, in almost complete ignorance of its meaning and history, assuming that they can 'prove' a theory by citing a peer reviewed paper. (e.g., see his talk at Oxford Real Farming Conference 2020).
'Peer review' is when an editor of a reputable academic publication receives an article or book (either uninvited, or commissioned), and decides it might be good to publish it in one of their journals or book series. This is the first line of censorship.
Having decided it might be 'good' for the publication to publish this article, the editor sends it to two or three independent experts - of his or her choice alone - in the field, without telling the reviewers who wrote the article (nor revealing to the author of the article who the peer reviewers are). If the reviewers decide that the article has enough merit to be put into the public arena of academic debate, they will give it the ok. This is the second line of censorship.
Very few academics comment on the way this seems to give an authority to the article that it does not in fact have.
Perhaps the main function of peer review for many academics is to ensure that they keep their jobs: most permanent academic jobs now require the academic to produce several peer reviewed articles every year. Hence the explosion of new ‘academic’ journals publishing peer reveiewed papers every year, most of them worhtless verbiage and read by at the most a few hundred other specialists, at the least, just three - the editor and two peer reviewers.
So here are two narrow gates by which an academic study may be excluded from formal, public debate. This shuts down the possibility of real academic debate happening - which is the only way of enabling the truth, however provisional, of emerging.
A crucial point to keep hold of is that peer reviewers are not declaring an article to be valid in terms of evidence or theory, let alone 'settled science', when they ok it for ublication. Merely that on first reading, here is a study that has enough apparent, substance to be given a chance to be either accepted or rejected on good evidence and argument by the entirety of the 'expert community' that deals with that discipline.
It is sort of like being indicted before a Grand Jury in America, who will decide whether your case merits being judged in a court of law.
Even the Guardian occasionally gets near to being accurate. In an otherwise flawed article James Heathers writes, "... peer review, the formal process of reviewing scientific work before it is accepted for publication, is not designed to detect anomalous data. It makes no difference if the anomalies are due to inaccuracies, miscalculations, or outright fraud.....
At its worst, it is merely window dressing that gives the unwarranted appearance of authority, a cursory process which confers no real value, enforces orthodoxy, and overlooks both obvious analytical problems and outright fraud entirely." ("The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/05/lancet-had-to-do-one-of-the-biggest-retractions-in-modern-history-how-could-this-happen
But even more, here is David Noble (a world-eminent historian of science) on 'peer review':
"the peer review system in my view is doing what it was designed to do - censor. And filter. Peer review is a system of prior censorship, prior review – prior meaning prior to publication."(https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1002/S00222.htmDavid Noble)
Since the 1960s, real scientists have recognised that there is a real crisis in the reliability of peer reviewed 'scientific research':
"...in almost 73% of the [295] reports read ... conclusions were drawn when the justification for these conclusions was invalid." Schor, Stanley (1966). "Statistical Evaluation of Medical Journal Manuscripts". JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. 195 (13): 1123–8. (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/658800)
One of the world's most eminent and quoted epidemiologists (John Ioannidis) wrote in 2005 a now famous article, demonstrating that the majority of medical research papers did not reach valid conclusions. ("Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" PLoS Med. 2005 PLoS Med. 2005 Aug; 2(8): e124.
Published online 2005 Aug 30. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/).
Despite his stature as one of the world's leading epidemiologists and meta-researchers, an eminent Professor at Stanford University, leading a large team of researchers, the studies he and his colleagues did on 'covid 19' were misrepresented stupidly, sometimes scurrilously and continuously not only by main stream journalists, but also by mainstream academics in 'Peer Reviewed' articles. Ultimately most of his work has been proven to be accurate, but none of the mainstream critics or academics, to my knowledge, have apologised to Ioannidis for their mistakes or even worse than mistakes.
An academic I worked closely with - eminent in his own field - said that he did not take reviewing seriously - it was a chore; he did it superficially; and thought everyone else in his field had a similar take.
So when someone waves 'Peer Review' at you as if that settles the argument, ask them if they know what peer review is.