If "outsiders" actually knew how peer review worked, I don't think it would give them a great deal of confidence. Peer review literally means that a few other p

If "outsiders" actually knew how peer review worked, I don't think it would give them a great deal of confidence. Peer review literally means that a few other people (often two or three, maybe five at the outside) looked at a manuscript and failed to find anything too objectionable. Since these decisions are just based on a few people spending a few hours, you might expect this signal to be a noisy measure of quality, and it is. NIPS, an excellent machine learning/neuroscience conference, ran an experiment where 10% of the submissions were reviewed by two separate program committees. They found considerable disagreement between the two committees (~60% of the selected papers were different) More details here: http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/181996-the-nips-experiment/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/181996-the-nips-experime...