Quote:
When published in a peer-review journal, the scientist is asking other scientists to review it, test it for themselves, and see if it holds up to other similar tests.
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well, maybe....
As the spouse of a now-retired research scientist (cancer genetics) I've had a ring-side seat to the whole "peer-review" process for the past 45 years. It's definitely not as "scientific" as one would hope.
You might find this article interesting:
Peer Review is Not Scientific. Although written by someone in the social sciences, I can tell you that much of what he says about the peer-review process in his field holds equally true in the so-called hard-sciences.
Although he doesn't come right out and say it, I think the article's author thinks that paying scientists to do peer review would solve the problems and I don't think that is necessarily the best approach. A better one, IMHO, would be to reveal the names of the scientists who reviewed papers that get accepted for publication... and then make their "reviews" available to anyone interested in seeing them. And, also allow/encourage those who do such reviews to add the work to their CVs so it counts as professional work. And, if a paper is rejected for publication, let the scientists who wrote the paper know who the scientists are who reviewed it.
In addition to the issues raised in the article linked above, papers authored (or co-authored) by someone with name-recognition in the field are MUCH more likely to be accepted for publication that papers submitted by an unknown. Young scientists are so aware of this so well that they fall all over themselves to invite "name" scientists to "collaborate" with them on a projects just so they can add that person as a co-author. The name scientist may do little more than offer a single suggestion and (possibly) read over the finished paper before it is published!
And, well known well-respected researchers who are asked by journals to perform peer-review will often accept the assignments and then pass them along to the underlings in their laboratory to do the actual reviews. The top dog may or may not even look over the review his/her underling has prepared before it gets sent back to the journal. The journal editors may THINK the well-known researcher did the review...which, of course, means that the next time the researcher submits a paper to that journal for consideration, he'll be given a certain amount of "priority" because they have an established relationship with him.
And of course there is always the problem that yet another paper that reinforces accepted dogma and (maybe) just barely pushes the envelope a tiny bit is much more likely to be understood by even the best-intentioned reviewer than an equally well-researched and well-written article that comes to a conclusion that flies in the face of dogma.
Also, people peer-reviewing a submitted paper DO NOT attempt to replicate the bench-work described in the papers they're reviewing and nobody expects them to. So when you write that "when published in a peer-reviewed journal, the scientist is asking other scientists to review it, test it for themselves..." I hope you're not under the impression that experiments and results described in a peer-reviewed journal have somehow been "replicated" by other scientists in other labs before the work is published. It doesn't happen that way! At most, all that peer-review means is that some other scientists have read the work and it passed their personal "smell tests"... which of course also means that it is UNLIKELY to have taken a stance too far removed from what those other scientists already believed to be true.
And, in this day and age of scrambling for research dollars, NOBODY has the time or money to merely duplicate someone else's published work to figure out if they get the same results. Everybody is trying to push the envelope and do something new because that's the only way to get research grants. So, at best, they'll take published results and try to replicate them only to the extent necessary to then add on some other step that goes just a little bit further. And, when a second scientist cannot replicate something that has been published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, he is usually told "you must be doing something wrong." Nobody ever wants to believe that maybe the published work was wrong in the first place!
Just my 2cents.... well, maybe $2