I’m only a layman casual, but I have never in my life seen an actual peer review.
I’ve read/skimmed actual papers from primary sources whenever I actually care to try to understand the proof for something. No idea what a peer review looks like, no idea if the paper I read were ever peer reviewed.
I’m guessing maybe the publisher itself also/sometimes does the “we read it, looks fine”-process? Either way, I’ve never seen one. They’re like some mythical creature I’ve only ever heard descriptions of.
For any scientific journal that’s worth anything, your article has to get approved by other scientists in your field before the journal will accept it. They’re mostly just looking for exactly what this post is referencing. Does it seem legit? If it passes a once-over by the other scientists, then it gets published.
This is why you should not trust any single study by itself. It’s just the results from one experiment that easily could have had a consequential error no one picked up. The results could be statistical noise. Hell, even rarely, you’ll get someone who’s been faking data. This is not to say “science is broken,” only that science has never relied on the results from a single unreplicated experiment to determine truth. If you read about scientists from the past, it’s fairly common for them to publish a landmark paper and for no one to care, or even for people to argue they’re wrong. Only with additional research do they get proved correct and we imagine that everyone immediately accepted this new paradigm shift off of one single paper.
Is there no journal/publishing site where other scientists can put out publicly visible peer reviews of a paper after the paper is already published?
A peer review really is just someone checking for glaring errors. If a paper gets published and someone had some real beef with it, best they can do is some of their own research to prove how shitty the other team was. After that, there are some journals that will publish letters where people comment on previous articles. But generally, most articles just get mildly ignored. It’s only after a pattern of corroborating evidence piles up that people will start to say that the results of a particular early study were significant.
Mind you, the details about how this consensus process works varies from field to field. Particle physics has a different culture than hydrology. But, in general, one paper is not enough to hang your hat on.
Same but some of my friends i went to uni with is a moron who went on to do a PhD…
Its like having your work marked and, if they don’t Iike it, they’ll just say like “not clear enough” or “needs more research” and deny its publication.
I mean, what they meant was “you haven’t addressed Dr Y et. al.'s critique of that particular essay’s attempt at modelling the disease you’re researching” but they’re not just going to come out and tell you that. That would be too easy.
Every now and then I feel like I can hear them muttering some kind of highly expletive death threat at reviewer number 3.
