Posted on 11/06/2025 1:29:38 PM PST by karpov
Within academia, there seems to be a growing consensus that the peer-review system—once the backbone of academic scholarship—is broken. But is it irreparably so? Perhaps. At the very least, the breakdown of its current form is worth exploring. However, rather than abandoning the entire endeavor, we believe we have a novel solution. First, though, let us examine where the system went wrong.
In the Middle Ages, most scientific research was self-published, as scholars shared their findings among themselves. But, as the profession grew, that became impractical, and the scientific journal was born as a way of disseminating information. A scholar would have an idea, investigate, summarize his conclusions, and submit the resulting article to a journal. There, the editor or editors would consider it and decide whether to publish the work as-is, request revisions, or reject it altogether. Over time, as the number of scholars continued to proliferate, all of them under increasing pressure to publish, publish, publish—in order to be hired, earn tenure, and qualify for grants—the task of journal editors became overwhelming. There were just too many submissions to give them all fair consideration.
And so they came up with the idea of farming out their evaluation of submissions to teams of unpaid reviewers, other scholars in the same field or a related field who were (theoretically, at least) qualified to judge the quality of the research under consideration. This would relieve some of the burden on the editors while also bestowing an additional stamp of legitimacy on the finished product. Whether a given piece of scholarship was worthy of publication was to be determined not just by one or two people but rather by a group of “blind” experts. Thus, the label “peer-reviewed” became the gold standard for scholarly research.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Defund the Mann?
Partly true, however, if you are doing experiments with large enough groups and you actually are tapping into a cultural zeitgeist or human universal truth you should be getting consistent results.
Not exactly the same but close enough.
Of course most social scientists are not doing that. Their study groups tend to be absurdly small and most tend to have been selected to bring about the results that they want to push rather then a search for an objective reality.
This is a good topic worthy of a lot of discussion.
The problem has harmed all sciences—strangling almost all new or different ideas in the crib before they can be properly discussed and vetted.
The proposal in the article sounds reasonable to me—would definitely be an improvement over the current system.
One other modern trend that is trouble is that the sciences are under pressure to publish a theory or explanation about something before all the data is in.
If that theory has flaws it may be too late to fix them if big name professors signed off on them too early.
There is a tendency to dismiss any data in conflict with the accepted theory as “anomalous data” rather than considering the possibility that the data is just fine and it is the theory that is wrong.
I agree. A step in the right direction, but a small step. It still doesn’t fix the main problem IMHO, which is government funding. He who controls the money behind the research controls the expected “results”. This would also bias any reviewing done by colleagues (say the wrong thing about Bob’s research and you can kiss your grant goodbye).
Government funding is a huge issue.
Foundation/nonprofit funding has similar problems.
Corporate funding—another disaster.
Without truly independent science it is tough sledding.
Cool.
Who do we shoot first?
ANYONE who has ever had a case go before a jury of their, uhhh... [cough, cough] “peers” can see the problem with this present system.
“Our idea involves creating official online forums for each discipline, where scholars can post essays about their ideas at any stage, laying out the theoretical background, proposing hypotheses, disclosing research findings (including methodology), and extrapolating to implications or predictions. Other scholars in the community can comment on those essays”
Peers. They are the actual problem.
“Our idea involves creating official online forums for each discipline, where scholars can post essays about their ideas at any stage, laying out the theoretical background, proposing hypotheses, disclosing research findings (including methodology), and extrapolating to implications or predictions. Other scholars in the community can comment on those essays”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.