Peer
review is a process of self-regulation
by a profession or a process of
evaluation involving qualified
individuals within the relevant field.
Peer review methods are employed to
maintain standards, improve performance
and provide credibility. In
Academia Publishing,
review is often used to determine an
academic paper's suitability for
publication.
Pragmatically, peer review refers to the
work done during the screening of
submitted manuscripts. This process
encourages authors to meet the accepted
standards of their discipline and
prevents the dissemination of irrelevant
findings, unwarranted claims,
unacceptable interpretations, and
personal views. Publications that have
not undergone peer review are likely to
be regarded with suspicion by scholars
and professionals.
Open peer review
It has been suggested that traditional
anonymous peer review lacks
accountability, can lead to abuse by
reviewers, and may be biased and
inconsistent, alongside other flaws. In
response to these criticisms, other
systems of peer review with various
degrees of "openness" have been
suggested.
Anonymous peer review
Anonymous peer review, also called blind
review, is a system of prepublication
peer review of articles or papers for
journals by reviewers who are known to
the journal editor but whose names are
not given to the article's author. The
reviewers do not know the author's
identity, as any identifying information
is stripped from the document before
review. The system is intended to reduce
or eliminate bias.
Justification
It is difficult for authors and
researchers, whether individually or in
a team, to spot every mistake or flaw in
a complicated piece of work. This is not
necessarily a reflection on those
concerned, but because with a new and
perhaps eclectic subject, an opportunity
for improvement may be more obvious to
someone with special expertise or who
simply looks at it with a fresh eye.
Therefore, showing work to others
increases the probability that
weaknesses will be identified and
improved. For both grant-funding and
publication, it is also normally a
requirement that the subject is both
novel and substantial
Furthermore, the decision whether or not
to publish a scholarly article, or what
should be modified before publication,
lies with the editor of the journal to
which the manuscript has been submitted.
Similarly, the decision whether or not
to fund a proposed project rests with an
official of the funding agency. These
individuals usually refer to the opinion
of one or more reviewers in making their
decision. This is primarily for three
reasons:
Workload: A small group of
editors/assessors cannot devote
sufficient time to each of the many
articles submitted to many journals. Diversity of opinion: Were the
editor/assessor to judge all submitted
material themselves, approved material
would solely reflect their opinion. Limited expertise: An
editor/assessor cannot be expected to be
sufficiently expert in all areas covered
by a single journal or funding agency to
adequately judge all submitted material.
Reviewers
Reviewers are typically anonymous and
independent, to help foster unvarnished
criticism, and to discourage cronyism in
funding and publication decisions.
Procedure
In the case of proposed publications, an
editor sends advance copies of an
author's work to researchers or scholars
who are experts in the field. Usually,
there are two or three referees for a
given article.
Referees' evaluations usually include an
explicit recommendation of what to do
with the manuscript or proposal, often
chosen from options provided by the
journal or funding agency. Most
recommendations are along the lines of
the following:
1. To unconditionally accept the
manuscript or proposal,
2. To accept it in the event that its
authors improve it in certain ways,
3. To reject it, but encourage revision
and invite resubmission,
4. To reject it outright.
During this process, the role of the
referees is advisory, and the editor is
typically under no formal obligation to
accept the opinions of the referees.
The referees do not act as a group, do
not communicate with each other, and
typically are not aware of each others
identities or evaluations. There is
usually no requirement that the referees
achieve consensus. Thus the group
dynamics are substantially different
from that of a jury.
Peer review failure
Peer review failures occur when a
peer-reviewed article contains obvious
fundamental errors that undermine at
least one of its main conclusions. Many
journals have no procedure to deal with
peer review failures beyond publishing
letters to the editor.
Peer review in academia assumes that the
article reviewed has been honestly
written, and the process is not designed
to detect fraud.
An experiment on peer review with a
fictitious manuscript has found that
peer reviewers may not detect all errors
in a manuscript and the majority of
reviewers may not realize the conclusion
of the paper is unsupported by the
results.
When peer review fails and a paper is
published with fraudulent or otherwise
irreproducible data, the paper may be
retracted.
