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
conclusions 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.
