Gonna need to build a second LHC!
there are a couple journals where peer review means the former. one that i can think of is Organic Sytheses orgsyn.org
It’s a numbers game.
- X submits paper to Journal 1, and peers A,B,C reject it.
- X submits paper with minor changes to Journal 2, and only peers D and E reject it.
- X submits paper with minor changes to Journal 3, and only peer G rejects it
- X submits paper with minor changes to Journal 4, and no one rejects it.
Journal 4 increments prestige, Scientist X increments prestige, but nothing true or good is actually gained.
Science.
I believe in the scientific method. I believe in peer review.
I just don’t like that scientific journals have become so commodified that a lesser journal would accept volumes of bad science and bad review in order to boost its rankings whilst boosting the prestige of the scientist who is measured on the quantity of their work and not the quality.
Entire paper mills exist purely for this reason, and it’s a scourge on the scientific community.
Did peer F get murdered for indicating they were going to reject the paper? 🔍🧐
So it’s like a crowd strike code review
Scientists can get really petty in peer review. They won’t be able to catch if the data was manipulated or faked, but they’ll be able to catch everything else. Things such as inconclusive or unconvincing data, wrongful assumptions, missing data that would complement and further prove the conclusion, or even trivial things such as a sentence being unclear.
It generally works as long as you can trust that the author isn’t dishonest
I never learned peer review as anything more than others in the field reviewing the paper and confirming it meets standards. Its like logic vs truth. Peer review is like proofreading. Is the structure of the experiment proper. Is there controls. Is the statistical analysis proper. so on and so forth. Honestly though science is dependent on replication which used to be a sort of competition so it worked. Oh you think this is this and this is how you proved it. Well I will see for myself and I will lambast you if it does not work. It was kinda personal with the field before modern times. Competition was very direct. Now no lab wants to do anything but something they can say is new and a discovery. I feel at least 50% of public science funding should be for experiment replication
