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posted by n1 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the peer-reviewed-study-confirms-it dept.

Phys.org is running a story on some of the issues with modern peer review:

Once published, the quality of any particular piece of research is often measured by citations, that is, the number of times that a paper is formally mentioned in a later piece of published research. In theory, this aims to highlight how important, useful or interesting a previous piece of work is. More citations are usually better for the author, although that is not always the case.

Take, for instance, Andrew Wakefield's controversial paper on the association between the MMR jab and autism, published in leading medical journal The Lancet. This paper has received nearly two thousand citations – most authors would be thrilled to receive a hundred. However, the quality of Wakefield's research is not at all reflected by this large number. Many of these citations are a product of the storm of controversy surrounding the work, and are contained within papers which are critical of the methods used. Wakefield's research has now been robustly discredited, and the paper was retracted by the Lancet in 2010. Nevertheless, this extreme case highlights serious problems with judging a paper or an academic by number of citations.

Personally, I've been of the opinion that peer review is all but worthless for quite a while. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who has issues with the process.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:39AM (#117586)

    You may not know how peer review works. Here's the main differences between peer review and SN moderation:

    • In peer review, the article gets sent to a selected reviewer prior to publication. In SN moderation, comments get moderated after publication.
    • In peer review, the editor selects the reviewers of a certain article (and can influence the result quite a lot by strategic selection). The reviewer can decline a review, but not choose to review a certain article. In SN moderation, the moderators are completely free which comments they want to moderate.
    • In peer review, the editor has the last word, and can override the decision of the reviewers (or even decide to reject without sending it to reviewers at all). In SN moderation, there's nothing like that.
    • In peer review, if an article is rejected, it doesn't get published (you are, of course, free to try it again at another journal, or to publish it in a non peer-reviewed place — the latter, however, will not help much in getting your next employment). In SN moderation, the worst thing that happens from negative moderation is that people have to adjust their settings to see your comments, and you may get negative karma, meaning that you don't get the chance to moderate other comments. And of course, SN moderations don't usually have an effect on your employment.