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The Absurdity of Peer Review

What the pandemic revealed about scientific publishing

Mark Humphries
Elemental
Published in
8 min readJun 3, 2021

Image: athree23/Pixabay

I was reading my umpteenth news story about Covid-19 science, a story about the latest research into how to make indoor spaces safe from infection, about whether cleaning surfaces or changing the air was more important. And it was bothering me. Not because it was dull (which, of course, it was: there are precious few ways to make air filtration and air pumps edge-of-the-seat stuff). But because of the way it treated the science.

You see, much of the research it reported was in the form of pre-prints, papers shared by researchers on the internet before they are submitted to a scientific journal. And every mention of one of these pre-prints was immediately followed by the disclaimer that it had not yet been peer reviewed. As though to convey to the reader that the research therein, the research plastered all over the story, was somehow of less worth, less value, less meaning than the research in a published paper, a paper that had passed peer review.

Imagine reading about the discovery of the structure of DNA with that same reticence we use today: “In a recent Letter to the journal Nature, Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Francis Crick proposed a new structure for DNA (not yet peer reviewed). They claim their “double helix” model, a spiral…

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Elemental
Elemental

Published in Elemental

Elemental is a former publication from Medium for science-backed health and wellness coverage. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Mark Humphries
Mark Humphries

Written by Mark Humphries

Theorist & neuroscientist. Writing at the intersection of neurons, data science, and AI. Author of “The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds”

Responses (31)

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Two comments here. One: “does not guard against everything” is certainly not the same as “does not guard against anything”. Sure, some bad analysis makes it through peer review, but plenty of bad analysis gets caught, and that benefits science as a…

161

Without an alternative suggestion this article will end up being just a rant. What would you suggest is a better way to filter out the genuine good from the noise? For all we know - peer review might be the worst method of filtering except for all others (borrowing from Churchill's quote on democracy).

101

My only complaint about this article is that it was too short and didn't go further !
Einstein's papers did not need peer-review because the editor of the journal to which he submitted, was none other than Max Plank - who didn't need any assistance from anyone when it came to discerning good papers from bad.

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