As a programmer (and not as an academic person), I have no idea how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources.
I wish it was like npmjs.com who provides me an audit tool for their Nodejs packages in the same npm CLI.
It's on you to go sniff the butt of the journal that publishes a research article and see if they're legit. You're also on the hook for seeing if there have been any retractions, letters of concern, articles in reply, and who if anyone cited the thing you're reading.
Some journals offer tools specific to themselves to help you with some of this, and there are a few non-journal services that can help you get some of this information across journals (google scholar, pubmed, etc...) but they're scattershot and discipline specific.
That's overly pessimistic. There's lots of effort making publicly funded research more accessible.
You won't get universal consensus on authority. That's not pessimism; that's an odd kind of optimism, really...
There isn't one, as far as I know, but supposedly one can turn to bona fide publications for peer-reviewed studies/reports etc; there are specialist journals about almost any science subject, however mainstream or niche.
However, the peer-review process is increasingly discredited/broken, according to articles such as this recent example [1] Peer review is frustrating and flawed – here’s how we can fix it.
It would also seem that many supposedly reputable journals often publish without due diligence, too. The site Retraction Watch [2] exists to draw attention to published papers subsequently having to be withdrawn. Reasons for retractions can be poor methodology, dubious authorship and lots more - which point to failings in the peer-review system.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/peer-review-frus...
This is a different problem than the issue of a central repository for all peer reviewed articles. Some journals allow you to see the trail of the actual peer review (questions raised by reviewers, responses & changes made by authors, etc) but this is far from the norm. The standard practice is to only offer the final version of the article, and to not release the trail of peer review to the general public.
pubpeer.com does allow people to raise concerns and discuss individual publications for technical issues/plagarism, and its typical for the authors to come on there and provide further information or clarifications. Pubpeer however is a third party site distinct from the peer review process that journals do before publication. It's also not uncommon to see papers pulled due to concerns raised on pubpeer.