The peer-review process is an old and important part of scientific research. If a scientist does some experiments and thinks the data from those experiments support a conclusion, they can write a several page long paper detailing this. While the discussion portion of it is mostly an opinion piece, there will be a results section that other peer-reviewers can interpret and determine if they agree with the author’s conclusion. They can accept the paper, reject it, or tell them that they want additional experiments and revisions made to it before making a decision. They can even accept it but also say they want major revisions. This depends on a number of factors like the field of research (chemistry, physics, psychology), the competitiveness of a journal, and the claims made in the scientific paper.
There are some significant pros to this peer review process. The first is that it helps to prevent misinformation. Anybody can post a tweet saying global warming is not real since there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the evidence supports a given tweet. However, not anybody/any claim can get through the peer-review process. A scientist must have novel data, with a procedure specific enough that somebody could go out and reproduce the experiment your data is from. Every paper we have read in class has had to go through this process which makes them more believable since other experts in the field of sequencing/molecular microbiology have had to agree that what the papers are saying is acceptable given the evidence presented. There is also context in publishing scientific papers. If there are 10,000 scientific papers that say global warming is real and you did an experiment that suggests it isn’t, the peer review process will likely force you to do additional experimentation to refute the established scientific precedent. However, this is also a potential con.
Since humans are the ones reviewing the paper, they are subject to human biases. For example, let’s say you try to publish a paper that gives good and reasonable scientific evidence directly refuting the research of one of the peer-reviewers (not an impossible situation in smaller fields). Can the peer-reviewer truly be impartial and accept the claims made by the person trying to publish a paper even if the science backs up the claims? The answer is probably not always. It is certainly possible that they will state that you need to do extra experiments to refute the established precedence when you have done enough to do so, they just don’t want to accept your conclusions. On the other side, there is nepotism in publishing. When a scientist knows and has worked with the reviewers in a given journal, most would agree that this increases their chances of getting published in it. Even if the name is taken off the paper during the review process, if you are an established scientist in a field (which is literally what a peer reviewer is) then it is not incredibly hard to tell who wrote a paper. If it’s a former grad student of yours don’t you want them to succeed and publish in your journal? This highlights how this bias does not always have malicious intent, but it does make the peer-review process not fully objective or meritocratic. For example, in our course, we reviewed each other’s research proposal. My roommate is also in this same course and I know what he wrote his proposal on. If I got his paper, this would likely affect the review I would give it because I have a personal relationship with him, care about how my review impacts his feelings, and have some self-interest in that if I give him a terrible review and he finds out it was me, it could cause issues.
While the peer-review process has flaws and it should be reformed to make it more meritocratic and less biased against less well-connected or non-English-speaking scientists, it has played an important role in ensuring the integrity of scientific research and the progression of human civilization.
