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Peer Review Highly Sensitive To Poor Refereeing
$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."
Just this week, I was asked to peer review a paper in which I was mentioned in the Acknowledgments. The request was sent out automatically -- the journal has records of all their authors, and the keywords for this paper matched the keywords in my profile, so I was picked to review it.
I recused myself, but really I should never have been asked. If they're going to handle the peer review process automatically, the artificial intelligence that makes the decisions needs to be improved.
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Well that's not always the case. Different journals have different review processes. Some ask for numerical choices on a scale, others want choices in terms of "strongly agree", "somewhat agree" etc. for specific questions, others want only written comments and a final choice. Even this final choice is different in many cases, sometimes restricted to Accept, Accept with minor corrections, Accept with major corrections, Invite for resubmission and simply Reject, while others take the final choice as an aggregate of multiple choice responses or numerical averages. Some systems are obviously easier to be biased with than others.
Regardless of all this though, sometimes you'll find out that only two of three reviewers responded, and at least one of those probably got one of their postdocs or even a PhD student to do the review. Some reviews will have empty parts where a reviewer was supposed to write a paragraph but couldn't be bothered, or because they didn't want to reveal the fact that they were totally unfamiliar with the subject matter. Getting a journal paper published is more hit and miss than you'd think. I used to think that a good paper with good ideas was enough, but it's not always the case.
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Slashdot let's you publish first, and be reviewed later. The peer-review system used by scientists forces them to work on their papers until someone finally "mods" it acceptable. Imagine how much faster science could advance if we had a system that actually let scientists focus on research, let people trained in technical writing do the reporting, and let Google design a post-publication moderation system to sort out the useful advances from the career posturing. Science could learn a lot from Slasdot. It is simply ignorant that we continue to put up huge barriers to publication.
I actually read the comments on TFA, and down at , there's a particularly interesting one:
This study overlooks not only the role of the editor, but also the process in which the authors are able to answer the referees' objections. When the referees are competent, this leads to better papers through useful suggestions. On the other hand, when they aren't, overcoming the exasperation of the authors, their objections are easily brushed away, and the paper eventually gets through. Also, when the case is particularly contentious, there's still the option of calling for an adjudicator. In summary, the peer-review process is far more complex than this simulation might suggest. On the dark side, I’ve also noticed that referees are sometimes reluctant to object papers from certain renowned authors. The human factor is hard to remove. I guess many people will agree that there’s a need to look for better approval systems, specially today, when there’s an explosion of submissions. However we must also acknowledge that the present system has served its purpose of maintaining a certain quality.
There's actually a reasonably intelligent discussion going on in there...