Originally posted by sylas
View Post
duty_calls.png
Peer review is not what determines whether a scientific paper is valid. It is simply a way of managing the initial checks to see if a paper is worthy of consideration by the larger scientific community. The real review and evaluation of scientific papers and ideas is what happens after publication, as other scientists read and followup with more research or data or response. Peer review is just a couple of individual experts who generally manage fairly obvious flaws in a proposed paper.
You can always get your publications out in any case, especially now we have the internet. A good paper that fails to get into a scientific journal can still get out through blogs or websites or self publication or specialized journals without conventional scientific review: and if it actually is significant and any good, it will get picked up and passed around. If it still doesn't have any impact, then it would not have had any impact as a journal article either. We are well used to journals that publish lousy papers; getting published doesn't correspond to having an impact on the field.
Rejection at the peer review stage is nearly always due to explicitly identified flaws in a paper.
What I would really like to add to this are examples of excellent papers that failed to get published because of improper peer review.
Leave a comment: