Peer Review

[tpeichel]

Be very skeptical the next time someone points to a scientific credentialist and claims validity because of "peer review".



http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439
But the real story is that a fair number of journals who actually carried out peer review still accepted the paper, and the lesson people should take home from this story not that open access is bad, but that peer review is a joke. If a nakedly bogus paper is able to get through journals that actually peer reviewed it, think about how many legitimate, but deeply flawed, papers must also get through. Any scientist can quickly point to dozens of papers – including, and perhaps especially, in high impact journals – that are deeply, deeply flawed – the arsenic DNA story is one of many recent examples. As you probably know there has been a lot of smoke lately about the “reproducibility” problem in biomedical science, in which people have found that a majority of published papers report facts that turn out not to be true. This all adds up to showing that peer review simply doesn’t work.

And the real problem isn’t that some fly-by-night publishers hoping to make a quick buck aren’t even doing peer review (although that is a problem). While some fringe OA publishers are playing a short con, subscription publishers are seasoned grifters playing a long con. They fleece the research community of billions of dollars every year by convincing them of something manifestly false – that their journals and their “peer review” process are an essential part of science, and that we need them to filter out the good science – and the good scientists – from the bad. Like all good grifters playing the long con, they get us to believe they are doing something good for us – something we need. While they pocket our billions, with elegant sleight of hand, then get us to ignore the fact that crappy papers routinely get into high-profile journals simply because they deal with sexy topics.

[JustAlex]

When will you get it man?

ALL science....ALL of it is falsifiable.

Which means that ANYTHING you say in the scientific community can be put up for review by any other scientist.

In fact, MANY scientist jump at this, because it can give their careers a boost, they can win a nobel prize or get funding for their own research.

The Peer Review process is NOT perfect, but it's the best we've got, and until now scientists have been doing a pretty good job at it.

[centrehice]

Alex:

He does not believe in science and fact. Just look at the history of his posts.

[Wickabee]

Do you want non-peer review.

[tpeichel]

As I said earlier, be very skeptical when someone points to a scientific credentialist and claims validity because of "peer review". Especially when they follow it with "the science is settled".

[Wickabee]

As I said earlier, be very skeptical when someone points to a scientific credentialist and claims validity because of "peer review". Especially when they follow it with "the science is settled".

So what do you propose instead, if it's such a problem.

Frankly, I think it's smart to be skeptical of most of what one hears.

[JustAlex]

As I said earlier, be very skeptical

So now you're a skeptic?

Want to know how skeptics live their lives?

They constantly question things they are told and even their own beliefs are constantly questioned...

So tpeichel, how skeptical are you?

Do you live your life questioning everything you are told or hear?

Have you put your most sacred beliefs under the microscope of skepticism?

Let me tell you something....I did, and it was the best decision I've ever made in my life.

So go ahead and question the things that scientists say, but if you truly want to be intellectually honest with yourself, you should also question the things that are outside of science, such as religious beliefs.

Put them under the test, let's see what happens.

[tpeichel]

Experiments should be repeatable.

http://www.economist.com/news/leader...nce-goes-wrong
A SIMPLE idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better.

But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.


Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.

One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.

[Wickabee]

Also be wary of any government funded studies about illicit drug use. They have a history of throwing out findings that don't match their rhetoric and the ones that do are horribly unscientific.