Peer review and scientific journals

摘要

I do not think Dr. Weiss goes anywhere new, here. But I cannot argue with where he has been. His letter is a re-statement of all the well-known pros and cons of the present peer review system. No one believes peer review to be a fail-safe "panacea" todeal with the sorts of UFOs that can appear in mainstream, or in the "grey" scientific literature to which Sinclair and Cassman (2004) referred in their Discussion paper in Field Crops Research 88, 9-10. All the issues raised by Weiss are familiar characteristics of a less-than-perfect system, but it is the best we have got, and most of the time it works quite well. When it fails completely it often elicits a combination of acute embarrassment and/or (perhaps disproportionately) an over-righteous response - depending on the circumstances and the stakes. Sadly, but unavoidably, examples exist where, with hindsight, the objectivity or quality of the peer review process has been found wanting. But they were found.