Describe the process of peer review to someone who does not frequently read scientific articles. In your response, consider the pros and cons of peer review and how that might impact the credibility of the results that come from that scientific article.
Peer review is an important part of publishing scientific articles because this process validates a manuscript’s information. This is done through other scientists in the same field reviewing the information and confirming it is valid and not made up. If the information is rejected, it will not be published and must be rewritten and resubmitted for peer review. The process of peer review might fill in gaps that the paper might have or make it easier to read.
Pros
- Establishes validity based on expert knowledge of other scientists from the same discipline, which should prevent plagiarized work from being accepted.
- Allows for the researchers to revise and improve their work before actual publication.
- Allows journal editors to isolate the most important research for publication from a group of papers based on the reviews of experts.
- Peer review is the standard for most researchers.
Cons
- The large time delay between research and publication.
- Peer review takes a lot of resources to perform as well from people who have to do their own research too.
- Researchers debate as to whether peer review is very effective in finding errors in academic papers.
- If it is a small expert group, it might be hard to keep it anonymous,
- Peer reviewers might protect current beliefs and not want to branch out to new ideas.
