The case against peer review

http://www.slate.com/id/2116244/

by fidgross • 16 years ago

23 16 16 years ago

My experience being on the reviewer side of the process is very limited. As a frequent reader of papers in CS I'm of the opinion that peer review is accomplishing very little outside of checking theoretical results with proofs that can be vetted. I can count on one hand the number of papers I've read in the past month or two describing an implementation of a technique where the implementation described was available publicly. In all other cases, I had to take the authors' words for it. Given the poor handling of data for publication I've seen in the past, I'm not especially inclined to do that.

I also don't believe that the current conference / journal system for publication of results works especially well. There's a well-documented bias against the publication of negative results. It encourages authors to "save up" interesting work for publication when pieces of it could have been independently examined much sooner. In combination with "publish or perish" metrics, it discourages valuable or interesting work that might not ever rise to the level of a full journal publication. The format is incredibly stifling; important information is left out to satisfy page limits, code mangled to fit within columns, and interesting data visualizations not even considered because of the constraints of the media.

I think it's inevitable that the current common publication system will be recognized as a relic of the paper era, but I fear that any fix will only make superficial changes to the system. I think it'd be much more useful to have a publication system that allows work to be published with full data in a format that allows evolution in response to open reviews. This obviously wouldn't work well in areas where protection of patient privacy requires data obfuscation; I don't have a good answer for that. In all other areas, especially where the research is funded by public money, full data and code transparency ought to be key, especially where raw data must be adjusted or normalized in order to be useful and in situations where bugs in modeling programs could subtly affect results.

Edit: see also this excellent article from last month's Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damne...

younata• 16 years ago

    I can count on one hand the number of papers I've read in the past month or two describing an implementation of a technique where the implementation described was available publicly.

so... less than 32 papers have the implementation available publicly?

Joking aside, how many papers have you read in the past month or two? I assume the number is at least in the double digits.

bmastenbrook4• 16 years ago

I honestly don't remember. It's somewhere between 25 and 50, though not all of those were read in detail.

ohmygodel2• 16 years ago

"As a frequent reader of papers in CS I'm of the opinion that peer review is accomplishing very little outside of checking theoretical results with proofs that can be vetted."

As a frequent reader and reviewer of CS papers I totally disagree. Peer review helps narrow a huge incoming flood of new research into a smaller stream of results that are the most novel, important, and correct. Without explicit review, your options would be to either waste your time wading through the mess or use reviews from sources whose advice you consider on an ad hoc basis. I'm sure there are better systems that take advantage of the Internet, the wisdom of crowds, data aggregation and mining, etc. The current system of peer review does adequately perform a major service, though.

bmastenbrook4• 16 years ago

Given the huge number of niche conferences and journals out there, is the filtering that takes place actually useful? I'm not convinced of it. I've engaged in venue shopping myself. Meanwhile useful, novel work is published in the open every day and my brain hasn't collapsed from the inrush of poorly filtered information. I run across junk, but I find published junk too. At least the former usually has the decency to not waste my time with a bunch of academic boilerplate language and a page of barely relevant citations.

d0mine• 16 years ago

The internet by itself can play role of the peer review system. For example, github is a much better medium to publish a work that needs to be examined (reproduced) than any paper journal.

Locke1689• 16 years ago

In my experience, the biggest problem in CS academia is reproduction. It seems that very few people spend time attempting to reproduce results from academic papers, even though that's an important part of the method.

roadnottaken• 16 years ago

Peer review is not "the gold standard of modern science." It is the very first step in a long process of communal collection and evaluation of data. Everyone knows it's badly flawed, but it's better than nothing. It's only when scientific results are reproduced and (more importantly) built-upon that an experiment or finding becomes widely accepted (and thus "true").

The problem comes in when the media pounces on every wild claim in the literature and re-states it as fact before the ink is dry. Actually it's not just the media's fault, a big part of the problem are the press-releases that are becoming a standard part of publishing in high-profile journals.

EDIT: An analogy: saying that peer review is the gold standard in science is like saying that releasing open-source software is the gold standard for security. Just because something is open/reviewed doesn't mean it's been deeply vetted.

lotharbot• 16 years ago

Right. Peer Review doesn't mean "this paper is correct", it merely means "this is interesting enough to be worth a look." It's a way of filtering out the clearly bogus and the trivial/repetitive. True progress starts after peer review and publication, when other scientists look at the same model, write their critiques, and do their own experiments.

I'd think this would be old hat to anyone who went to grad school in a technical field. I know in my department, all students were expected to read and discuss several peer-reviewed papers each term. Finding methodological weaknesses, oversimplifications, or outright mistakes was common.

dspeyer• 16 years ago

If not peer review then what? Centralized review? Is there any hope that that won't collapse under its own weight? Public review? That hasn't done all that well in the Open Source world.

vacri• 16 years ago

Come now. Out of literally thousands of peer-reviewed articles that hit the journals every month, the author provides one example of a bad paper from 2001 and some vague handwaving at problems in the early '80s.

Clearly this means that the system is a total and utter failure and should be tossed ASAP.

Leaving the sarcasm behind now, peer review is but one element in the scientific process - and okay, it failed for the example paper. But another element - free and frank community feedback (ie: no sacred cows) - killed the paper, by the author's own admission. It's but one element of a series of checks and balances.

Besides, although I've only published one paper, the feedback from the peer reviewers made that paper tighter and more professional - so for my solitary data point, that element of the process did improve the quality of the article.

mazsa2• 16 years ago

perhaps hhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2000929 ?

mazsa2• 16 years ago

the case for peer review: http://www.mcafee.cc/Papers/PDF/EditorExperiences.pdf

jamii• 16 years ago

The guys behind arXiv have some interesting thoughts on the subject:

http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/pg02pr.html

The case against peer review

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