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That is not so in many engineering fields. Peplow, Mark (2014) Peer review - reviewed, Top medical journals filter out poor papers but often reject future citation champions. Siler and his team tapped into a database of manuscripts and reviewer reports held by the University of California, San Francisco, that had been used in previous studies of the peer-review process.Īnyone who thinks “peer review” is somehow part of the scientific method does not know what science is. Given the time and resources involved in peer review, he suggests, top journals that accept just a small percentage of the papers they receive can afford to be risk averse. “This raises the question: are they scared of unconventional research?” says Siler. We should never place much confidence in a formalized process, especially one that’s unpaid and anonymous, to spot the papers that will be the most cited 50 years from now.īut the team also found that 772 of the manuscripts were ‘desk rejected’ by at least one of the journals - meaning they were not even sent out for peer review - and that 12 out of the 15 most-cited papers suffered this fate. And art cannot be mandated or controlled. Their work must be impeccable logical, but it is an art to cut through human biases to recognise that genius. There is no formalized sure-fire system to find and reward the creative genius needed for the big leaps in science. The work was published on 22 December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The shocking thing to me was that the top 14 papers had all been rejected, one of them twice,” says Kyle Siler, a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, who led the study 1. But they failed - quite spectacularly - to pick up the papers that went to on to garner the most citations. Using subsequent citations as a proxy for quality, the team found that the journals were good at weeding out dross and publishing solid research. Mark Peplow discusses a new PNAS paper in Nature: Even high ranking science journal editors are afraid of being called names. What chance would anyone have of getting published if, hypothetically, they found a consequential mathematical error underlying the theory of man-made global warming? Which editors would be brave enough to even send it out for review and risk being called a “denier”? Humans are gregarious social beings, and being in with the herd affects your financial rewards, as well as your social standing. Unpaid anonymous peer review is useful at filtering out some low quality papers, it is also effective at blocking the controversial ones which later go on to be accepted elsewhere and become cited many times, the paradigm changers.Īnd the more controversial the topic, presumably, the worse the bias is. It is a consensus filter.Ĭlassical peer review is a form of scientific gatekeeping (it’s good to see that term recognized in official literature).
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How to separate creative genius from creative mistakes? Not with peer-review. Nature discovers that political endorsements reduce their scientific credibility.The not-so-sustainable EV’s that have to be written off after a scratch.Wind fantasy land: to cover 8 days of half-speed wind, UK needs 1,000 times the “biggest battery” on Earth.Green revolution coming undone on the rocks of reality in Germany.
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The 800 year lag in CO2 after temperature – graphed.ClimateGate: Thirty Years in the Making (Edition 1.1).The evidence that AGW fans need to provide.
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