Peer review: a 2008 report on the sacred academic cow.

摘要

If an overwhelming number (85%) of academics agreed in the value of peer review for improving scientific communication (Ware, 2008), what could be wrong with this picture? Why do scientists and journal editors continue a system that has no scientific support for its use? What is the evidence? Peer review has not been demonstrated to work, that is, there is no evidence that it improves the quality of the science being reported (Jefferson, Rudin, Brodney Folse, & Davidoff, 2003). Yet, there is also no evidence that it does not work. For this reason, the "sacred cow" of peer review wanders the meadows of scientific publishing because together, scholars and editors, believe that it is the best mechanism we have to improve the quality of published papers. With this journal and with others that are in the business of publishing research, there are countless examples of how manuscripts have been improved based on the reviewers input. Reviewers spend many hours providing content expertise and insight into how to reach the readers and inform them in the best way possible. At times this may be as critical as finding an error in the analysis or as simple as identifying new references that have just been published. There are always significant contributions made by each of the peer reviewers. In the decades in which I have been writing and editing I have witnessed these contributions over and over, and the peer review process seems to improve the quality even if we do not have the scientific support for its value.