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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."
This is precisely what the global warming skeptics say is happening with the global warming alarmist community. ie. scientists review each others' papers, in a 'co-operative' manner as it were.
I think I'll point some skeptics at this paper and then sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch what happens.
"The system provides an opportunity for referees to try to avoid embarrassment for themselves, which is not the goal at all," he says.
So, if a reviewer sees a paper that has actual data and a conclusion that goes against the consensus of the scientific community, the reviewer may reject it for fear of appearing foolish? Or rejecting someone just because of their publicized personal beliefs?
Here's a hypothetical, a climate scientist who's an openly devout Christian finds data that sheds doubt on human caused global warming will be rejected because someone's afraid of looking foolish.
That's the way I'm interpreting this study.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
When you're talking about scientific papers, a "bad apple" reviewer may be able to skew the record in terms of 1-10 scales, but reviewers also do a qualitative write-up of the material. That's really the only important part and if one or two people fall outside the line of general consensus, they'll just be ignored.
I mean scientists who publish among themselves, i.e. inside their narrow specialty, in their own journals, without checking whether the problem at hand has been solved elsewhere. This is more and more common as people get more specialized, and can lead to very basic errors propagated inside the whole community, like rheologists believing in the existence of pure elongational flow (a trivial misunderstanding of tensor algebra). Since the peers reviewing the papers are members of the same community, those errors usually get unnoticed.
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.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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.
As much crap as /.'s moderation system gets, it actually tends to be one of the better systems I've seen on the net. First of all, it's highly customizable so if I wanted to I can easily set it to add or remove value from certain types of moderations. I usually bump flamebait and troll up a few pegs just so I can see the posts that do occasionally get unfairly moderated. I can also add other posters I find interesting to a list and bump up their post value so if I'm interested in what they have to say I can always make sure I'll see it.
I also think that the community goes a long way towards making the system work well. Sure there will always be people who abuse the system and moderate posts with which they disagree as flamebait, etc. but the community as a whole does a good job of promoting interesting lines of conversation and for any given topic there are probably a few people in the community who specialize in that area and can provide some excellent commentary.
It's not perfect, but it's probably one of the best systems in actual practice that's currently being used.
Each reviewer produces a binary recommendation within the same timestep: ’accept’ or ’reject’. If a paper gets 2 ’accept’ it is accepted, if it gets 2 ’reject’, it is rejected, if there is a tie (1 ’accept’ and 1 ’reject’) it gets accepted with a probability of 0.5.
If a single 'bad' reviewer (i.e. one that gives the 'wrong' answer as determined by the 'correct' method of reviewing mentioned as a control in the paper) can cause a paper to have a 50:50 chance of acceptance or rejection it doesn't seem too suprising to me that a relatively small number of them could cause the process to become '[not] much better than by accepting papers by throwing (an unbiased) coin' - because in their model, in the case of a reviewer disagreement, that's exactly what is happening!
Broken record time, but yes. Such subversion of the peer review process did show up. The culprits weren't the ones you expect.
In general however, I think that this study is rather pessimistic. And anyway, it hasn't been peer reviewed, so who knows... ;-)
(yes, I did read TFA, but not the paper
The peer review system is great for regulation, standardization and unification. However, all scientists that I've worked with/researched with/spoken with much about this topic admit that the system can be annoyingly flawed by group think and conformity. One bad apple ruins the bunch, right?
The good news? While this part of the scientific community is not immune to problems, the slack is picked up elsewhere: As long as methods, data and results are transparent, reproducible and published we can actually have quality science.
I often speak to people about scientific research and they're shocked that it's not full proof. This is kind of like buying software (perhaps even a Microsoft product) and finding that it's not perfect. Science is done by committee and progresses slowly. "If we know what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research" ~Albert Einstein
Then again, I'm an idiot....
...... and idiots rule the world....
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...
My dad (has PhD in a scientific field from Cornell) told me that when submitting a thesis to a review board of professors, it really doesn't matter how "Tough" a professor is as long as that professor in your committee has a rival. Take advantage of their ego with an equally assertive ego. You purposefully choose the rival professor to join your committee as well. Then they'll spend all the review board discussions and presentations contradicting and arguing one with another, and in the end they'll both be so incensed, that they cancel each other out, and it doesn't matter what you presented... I guess the TFA is only pointing out that this occurs at the publishing level as well.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
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".
Blank until
Social Text is emphatically not prominent nor was peer-reviewed at the time of the affair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
While the Sokal affair is interesting, it has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
entropy happens
Peer review only works if the reviewers can be trusted and don't form a clique to get their work in and keep other people out. Surely anyone with even basic knowledge of human psychology would understand this?
Because this is an important question for serious people, but has no bearing on why various cranks (Intelligent Design people, climate change "skeptics", Time Cube, etc.) may have trouble getting their work in print. Papers by such people generally don't end up in the peer review phase - they aren't sent out for evaluation by the journal, so peer review doesn't matter.
That said, peer review provides substantially the same benefit as those "shoplifters will be prosecuted" signs you see in department stores.
Shoplifters are very seldom if ever actually prosecuted - but the threat, even the vaguest menace - of public scrutiny has an impact on behavior. I'm not talking about scientific fraud (which peer review will seldom catch,) but about quality of reasoning, doing the needed controls, etc. We may have a system that rewards good research little-better than an unbiased coin, but the <b>perception</b> that it works, or that it might work for you, motivates people to do the work needed to survive peer-review.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I think it comes down to two things.
First, the relative rarity of mod points encourages people to take it seriously. It also encourages the most active, most interesting posters to give up posting once in a while to moderate. Most other sites use a mod system that allows so many votes per article but still don't allow you to post and mod the same article. That means that the most frequent posters will seldom mod and that there can be people who only ever mod articles without ever commenting on them.
Second, attaching a reason to the mods encourages people to actually think about why they are modding the way that they are. As many people say, there is no "-1 I Disagree" mod, in order to mod someone down you have to be saying that they are actively trying to derail the conversation. Of course, lots of modders will ignore that and mod however they want, but I think that it does make at least some people stop and think before they accuse someone else of being flamebait or a troll.
Letting technical writing people doing the writing won't work. A large part of the scientific writing is the discussion of the experiment, which not only helps the scientist clarify his or her own thoughts and gives insight into future experiments, but also really only is worth reading if the scientist or members of the experimental team do it themselves. Technical writers really only would have the ability to write the experimental procedure, and even then it would be hard. Since science is so specialized you'd have to have technical writers for thousands of subdisciplines, etc. This goes especially true for mathematics, where the writing procedure is very closely related to doing mathematics.
Already because of this, no time for the scientist would be saved. A Google moderation system would have two problems. First, it wouldn't save any time because you still have to have some person doing the reviewing, and secondly you have to have someone qualified doing the reviewing whom you can trust to some extent to review in confidence, for otherwise if there are certain major problems with the paper but a few good ideas, they can be "stolen" by others, which may become a problem.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I agree with all that you said, but for heaven's sake, use full-forms at least once
For those as confused as I, the paper the parent refers to is "Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner. Falsification of the atmospheric CO2 greenhouse effects within the frame of physics.".
Contains such howlers as "There's no such thing as average temperature"... RC Wiki page
I've long thought there should be a "-1, Disagree" option in the drop-down box that takes a mod point but has no effect.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
But the proper way to communicate disagreement should be to respond with a reasoned counterargument, the goal being to show the justification for your disagreement and allow future readers the benefit of seeing your reasoning.
A "-1 Disagree" mod is anonymous censorship at it's worst. It adds nothing to the discourse. If all that you can add to the discussion is "I Disagree", then you can't add anything of merit to the discussion.
Contains such howlers as "There's no such thing as average temperature"...
Why is that a howler? It seems like uncontroversial physics if by "no such thing" you mean it has no physical meaning.
If I take two bodies, one with temperature T1 and one with temperature T2, what is their average temperature? If you say (T1+T2)/2 you are mathematically correct, but thermodynamically incoherent.
There is in general no thermodynamically meaningful way of averaging temperatures, which is why we should be talking about atmospheric heat content, not temperature, and why ocean temperatures--which are rising--are by far the most plausible evidence for increasing heat content in the troposphere.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I have several publications that were significantly improved through the peer review process. When I review papers my goal is not to shoot down the work, rather I try find ways to improve it. Of course there are 'bad' reviewers, who think that reviewing a paper is shredding it to pieces. These are actually easy to spot, because they rarely suggest anything useful and are often ignored by the journal editors. Speaking of which, journal editors are yet another part of the peer review process that is missing from their model