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Blog post: swansont: Stop Deifying Peer Review

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Stop deifying "peer review" of journal publications

 

I would like to add my two cents now - focusing on the exalted status some give to peer reviewed journal articles. I have three main concerns with this attitude which can be summarized as follows

1. Peer review is not magic

2. Peer review is not binary

3. Peer review is not static.

 

In general discussion, a peer-reviewed article is often a better citation than a mainstream/pop-sci article, but one has to acknowledge that peer-review simply means that some professionals have looked at it and found no (obvious) errors in the work. Mistakes can be made, things can be overlooked. Even without that, peer-review doesn't mean the results are true. The full process of scientific inquiry means others have to replicate the work somehow, if it's experiment, or test the work, if it's theory. As the article says, this is a continual process, and as I've said before, every experiment is a test of the principles that underlie it.Read and comment on the full post

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