Peer Review is veelal incompleet en onjuist..
Peer review is erg belangrijk in de wetenschap. Maar er is ook boeiende kritiek te vinden, bijvoorbeeld van de hand van de hoofdredacteur van 'the Lancet'. Zijn kritiek is interessant, omdat hij algemeen geaccepteerd is als een autoriteit op het gebied van wetenschapspublicaties. Daarom staat we even stil hij zijn visie!
Richard Horton, is zijn naam, en hij stelde:
“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding.
Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller.
But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”
Waarvan acte.
Voor de volledigheid de context, een persbericht uit 2000:
The process of peer review has been described as "unjust", "usually ignorant" and "frequently wrong" by no less than the editor of the eminent British journal The Lancet.
Writing in this week’s Medical Journal of Australia, Richard Horton said that editors and scientists alike portrayed peer review as a "quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller".
"But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong," he writes.
Horton said that this problem had been highlighted recently during the debate regarding the work of Ewen and Pusztai’s research (see links below) on the effects of feeding genetically modified potatoes to rats. While The Lancet reviewers judged that the work should be published, The Royal Society reviewers pronounced the research "flawed".
"Peer review as a reliable technique for assessing the validity of scientific data is surely discredited," Horton writes.
He says that a recent editorial in Nature was right to warn against an over-reliance on peer-reviewed publication, and argue for a need for "independent assessment and, in the midst of controversies, publicly funded agencies providing comprehensive, reliable and prompt complementary information".