Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

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> The position you take on the rubber stamping part of peer review is simply not serious at best in many areas of science and engineering.

Post your evidence, not your opinions. Here is my evidence -- one of many papers that makes the same point I do:

http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/4/178.full

Quote: "But does peer review `work' at all? A systematic review of all the available evidence on peer review concluded that `the practice of peer review is based on faith in its effects, rather than on facts'[1]"

[1] Jefferson T, Alderson P, Wager E, Davidoff F. Effects of editorial peer review: a systematic review. JAMA2002;287:2784 -6 (not available online)

If you want to continue posting to this thread, by all means try to imitate a scientist and locate evidence for your claims, as I have for mine.

> If you understand how science work beyond press releases, you'll know that the fraud and abuses will always be in the system.

A non-sequitur that fails to address my point in any meaningful way.

> Science becomes robust when it is clearly capable of rooting out bad work through processes like this one.

I'm waiting for you to try to refute my original claim using evidence.

Let me take the counterpoint: If peer review was a rubber stamping process then most journals or conference would publish most papers. Just take the journals and conferences I mentioned earlier and you'll see that their rejection stats are above 60-70% if not more.

With regard to the paper you mentioned http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/4/178.full

You need to go beyond the title of the paper. Please read the whole paper you are referencing and then please tell me how the following extract is running opposite to what I mentioned earlier:

" Opening up peer review ...The final step was, in my mind, to open up the whole process and conduct it in real time on the web in front of the eyes of anybody interested. Peer review would then be transformed from a black box into an open scientific discourse. Often I found the discourse around a study was a lot more interesting than the study itself. Now that I have left I am not sure if this system will be introduced...."

The simple fact is you understand peer review to mean how it is currently employed i.e. one time process used in the pre-publication stage (you do the review before the paper is published). That type of peer review is flawed as some bad papers still go through the process. What is proposed is having an on-going peer review so that over time, only the stronger papers stand. It really is not difficult to understand.

> Let me take the counterpoint: If peer review was a rubber stamping process then most journals or conference would publish most papers.

False. Rubber-stamping is a two-way street. Some deserving papers are not published, some that are not deserving are. Examples of both kinds abound.

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