| Title | Peer Review is Fraught with Problems, and We Need a Fix | |
| Date | Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:33AM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| 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 Wakefield's research has now been robustly discredited, and the paper was retracted by the Lancet in 2010.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.
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Peer Review is Fraught with Problems, and We Need a Fix on 2024-04-23 16:33:31