An Insight into Peer Review

April 23rd, 2009

Science papers get reviewed by other scientists in the field before publication.   I’ve written down some thoughts on peer review in the past.   Peer review is far from perfect, but it keeps cranks out of legitimate journals and improves papers generally.   Some ridiculous anti-science people (like deniers of evolution and global warming, see here) like to say that since peer review isn’t perfect, there’s no difference between papers published in peer-reviewed journals and papers put on the web, popular magazines, or rants posted on bulletin boards.

That’s stupid, of course.

But I was talking with my colleague here in China as we were trying to decide how to handle part of the data that we’re preparing to publish.   There’s a right way of doing it, and a quick and dirty way of doing it, that’s probably about as good, but we were trying to evaluate that “probably.”

My colleague said, “I just worry what the referee will say if we can’t justify this decision.”

I said, “Fair enough.   Let’s do it the right way.”

Just the fact that we know we’re going to be submitting the work to a peer-reviewed journal makes us more careful in the first place.   We don’t want to do something twice if the referee doesn’t like the first way we tried, so we want to avoid that even if it takes a little more effort in the first place.

There’s something similar in writing, and almost anything that takes real skill or craft.   You learn by being critiqued, and having experienced critique countless times, you start anticipating it, and it makes you better.   I mean, the referee of our paper might not say anything about the section we’re worrying about, either way we do it.   But just because there’s the chance, we are worrying about it even more.

There are some people I know, mostly young hotshots in astronomy who want to publish something first, or who just like to be fast because it’s a good career move.   These people sometimes do cut corners, I’m aware, because, they say, “The referee can catch mistakes.”   I don’t know too many older astronomers who think this way.   Referees note who is sloppy and that impression carries over to all sorts of things.   Also, referees are not perfect, and having to issue an erratum or show your face at a meeting over a very wrong paper is personally embarrassing.   You learn to be more careful.

Anyway, I guess I’ve known this for years but it just struck me how powerful just the knowledge that you’re going to be peer reviewed can be in science.

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