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Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-blame-jim-joyce dept.

$RANDOMLUSER writes "A new study described at Physicsworld.com claims that a small percentage of shoddy or self-interested referees can have a drastic effect on published article quality. The research shows that article quality can drop as much as one standard deviation when just 10% of referees do not behave 'correctly.' At high levels of self-serving or random behavior, 'the peer-review system will not perform much better than by accepting papers by throwing (an unbiased) coin.' The model also includes calculations for 'friendship networks' (nepotism) between authors and reviewers. The original paper, by a pair of complex systems researchers, is available at arXiv.org. No word on when we can expect it to be peer reviewed."

6 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This reminds me of something else by Farmer+Tim · · Score: 3, Funny

    Some ignoramus actually removed all chemical equations from the Smelting article.

    At least they didn't replace the whole thing with "Who smelt it dealt it".

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  2. Re:Will this change anything? by Adambomb · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, I thought i had developed a better system but the thesis was shot down in peer review.

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  3. Re:Highly political subjects? by drewhk · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wow, this gave me an idea! Researcher mimicry :)

    1. Find a successful researcher R in your field
    2. Find a journal/conference J in your field that anonymizies submitters
    3. Make a language profile L(R) of researcher R
    4. Make a paper P so that the profile L(P) is similar to L(R)
    5. Select a subset of citations from R and cite them in P
    6. Submit P to J
    7. ???
    8. Profit

  4. Just wondering. by RavenChild · · Score: 2, Funny

    Is this study peer reviewed?

  5. Re:just like /.? by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Funny

    Also in case you mods haven't noticed, making me invisible doesn't work. I just repost the exact-same thing tomorrow. I refuse to be censored

    I think Slashdot's system has the exact same flaw as Web Of Trust (WOT) which blocks foxnews.com on my browser. The system is abused by people pushing an agenda, with the intent of censoring what they don't like. It really needs to be abolished since it serves to SUPPRESS ideas rather than encouraging the sharing of thoughts.

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  6. Re:Highly political subjects? by smallfries · · Score: 2, Funny

    Exactly. Look how hard it has been for that TimeCube guy to get published just because this reviewers were educated stupid.

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