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How Did Those STAP Stem Cell Papers Get Accepted In the First Place?
bmahersciwriter writes The news team at the scientific journal Nature turns its investigative power on the journal itself. The goal: to try and understand how two papers that made extraordinary claims about a new way to create stem cells managed to get published despite some obvious errors and a paucity of solid evidence. The saga behind these so-called STAP cells is engaging, but sadly reminiscent of so many other scientific controversies.
Seriously though, I would have imagined that the papers should only get published if the results themselves were reproducible. Somehow those are skipped and the whole peer review system is in trouble.
Actually, the whole peer review system is not in trouble. See, the peer review done by (volunteer) reviewers for the magazine is just the first step. The next step comes when the article is published and the entire world gets to see the paper. The fact that the fraud was exposed in pretty short order after publication shows that, indeed, peer review does work.
Perhaps one source of misunderstanding here is that some people assume that peer review is supposed to be some kind of ultimate validation of a work. It's not, it's a basic sanity check and a validation that what the authors *claim* to have done is sufficiently interesting. It's not an endorsement by the publication venue that the work is correct and the authors are honest, because it's impractical to validate something like that without investing a lot more effort than feasible for a peer review. Reproducing a work might take months, even years.