Quotes About Peer review

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It's corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists.

Peer review is fine, as long as you're making incremental improvements to a technology.

Even when EPA subjects its science to peer review, the agency often stacks the deck of supposedly independent advisory panels by including members who are EPA grant recipients.

In my grandfather's lab, scientists did independent research, and peers reviewed and commented on its merits. Politics, he taught me, had no place in the scientific process.

Those in science perform research, have it reviewed by their peers, publish the results, and believe the answer should be obvious.

One of the biggest costs in the whole scientific publishing world is borne by the academic community, which is the peer review.

Peer review" at scientific journals means that every paper submitted gets reviewed by (generally) anonymous referees with expertise in the field.

The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is "that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Science, however, is never conducted as a popularity contest, but instead advances through testable, reproducible, and falsifiable theories.

Instead of simply correcting mistakes in code, the purpose of code reviews should be to share knowledge and establish common coding guidelines.

Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.

critique, and it's an art school thing, where you have to put your assignment up in front of the whole class so everyone can talk about it. Kind of like getting up in front of a firing squad.

For peer review, replication, and objectivity to make any headway on the continuum, for science to find the right answers to anything, there have to be wrong - or at least unlikely - answers.

Barring some national security concern, I see no valid reason to keep peer-reviewed research from the public. To be clear, by 'peer review,' I mean scientific review and not a political filter.

Isn't that the way science works? You present a hypothesis to your peers, you show them all your measurements and observations and data, and you ask them to make you a liar.

In science, however, "God did it" is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were at work. "God works in mysterious ways" will not pass peer review. Even such explanations as "belief in God" or "religiosity" must be broken down into their component parts to find possible causal mechanisms for the links between belief and behavior that lead to health, well-being, and longevity.

Science is pretty much the same. A conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers—the community of researchers—reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim.

facsimile science. (By this term I mean materials that carry the accoutrements of science—including in some cases peer review—but fail to adhere to accepted scientific standards such as methodological naturalism, complete and open reporting of data, and the willingness to revise assumptions in the light of data.)49 This is the problem of for-profit and predatory conferences and journals.

Historian Robert Proctor has recently documented the creation of newsletters, magazines, and journals—including journals with ostensible peer review—in which the results of industry-sponsored research could be reported, published, and then cited, as if they were independent. These included Tobacco and Health, Science Fortnightly, and the Indoor Air Journal.13 It was a simulacrum of science, but not science itself.