Peer review and scientific journals

摘要

Two major points, the necessity of peer review and the critical evaluation of scientific ideas in light of accepted principles and observations, were raised in the Discussion paper by Sinclair and Cassman (2004) in Field Crops Research 88, 9-10. The purpose of this letter is to briefly comment on the peer review perspective given by Sinclair and Cassman (2004) as related to scientific journals, rather than grant proposals. They discussed peer review in the most general of terms, as if it was a panacea, and as we all know, the devil is always in the details. Books have been written about peer review (Chubin and Hackett, 1990, Daniel, 1993 and Weller, 2001) and periodic meetings of the American Medical Association have been held to address this issue(Rennie and Flanagin, 1994, Rennie and Flanagin, 1998 and Rennie, 2002). Some of the problems associated with peer review are: process for selecting reviewers, treatment given manuscripts submitted by well known scientists compared to those submitted bylesser known scientists, slow speed of the review process, concerns about plagiarism by reviewers, reviewers tending to favor those manuscripts that agree with their ideas, difficulty accepting unorthodox ideas, and the anonymity of the reviewers and authors in double-blind systems. "Peer review is like democracy, which is, to use Churchill's phrase, 'the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time', Rennie (1993).