The Importance of Peer Review

Peer review is not without problems. Sometimes, opinions that are contrary to the mainstream approach or belief will have a hard time being accepted. For them, the bar is set much higher, because they not only add information, but attempt to change perceptions of existing information and understanding. Occasionally, an unscrupulous referee will reject a paper because it takes a position against a point of view that she or he has advocated. In such cases, researchers sometimes appeal and request an alternative referee, or send their paper to a different journal. Sometimes, peer review is not able to catch fraudulent results that look plausible, such as in the Schön scandal. Then, subsequent failure of attempts to reproduce these results leads to the conclusion that they were fraudulent.

To adapt Winston Churchill’s famous remark that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried”, peer review is a problem-fraught system of quality assurance for publications, but it is infinitely better than the arbitrary hype of success one often finds in the press. It has skepticism built in to it (which is good) and quite a bit of inertia (which has both positive and negative aspects). Mostly, peer reviewed information implies a degree of trustworthiness beyond that of other publications.

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