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Peer-review is deeply flawed and in its current form merely an advertisement form. We should focus on formatting science in a way that accounts for merit based

by kang 9y ago

Peer-review is deeply flawed and in its current form merely an advertisement form. We should focus on formatting science in a way that accounts for merit based on reproducibility, falsifiability and paying for real-life usage for recipe invented. Problem is not all science work is technological application.

devdoomari 9y ago
maybe it's time to augment peer-review with some other stuff instead of completely getting rid of it?
trapperkeeper74 9y ago
There are many, many BS papers because of the mass-production death-march researchers are told to produce, low p-value and sample size standards and ”Is Most Published Reseach Wrong?” (Veritasium, 2016) https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q Which is about an essay from 2005: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fj... This doesn’t mean adversarial and critical feedback are bad, it means dis/incentives, politics and standards need adjustments.
jonathanstrange 9y ago
The problem is not primarily peer-review, the problem is the ridiculous publication pressure we're under. I'm a postdoc in the humanities and some of my colleagues publish 10+ bullshit papers in crappy journals per year - their career is virtually guaranteed, even though everybody knows and agrees that it's impossible to write that much and maintain any level of quality. It doesn't matter how bad or insignificant your work is, if you manage to push out 5+ Scopus-indexed articles per year, nobody will be able to fire you or overlook you in tenure track applications, and I see more and more people gaming the system in that way. It's leads to a horrible display of mediocricity, of course, and anyone with a genuine interest in substantial scientific research has a hard time competing. Yes, some decision makers still take quality into account, but overall there is a clearcut trend towards chickenshit and bean-counting, at least in Portugal where I currently live.

by kang 9y ago

devdoomari 9y ago

maybe it's time to augment peer-review with some other stuff instead of completely getting rid of it?

trapperkeeper74 9y ago

There are many, many BS papers because of the mass-production death-march researchers are told to produce, low p-value and sample size standards and ”Is Most Published Reseach Wrong?” (Veritasium, 2016) https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q Which is about an essay from 2005: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fj... This doesn’t mean adversarial and critical feedback are bad, it means dis/incentives, politics and standards need adjustments.

jonathanstrange 9y ago

The problem is not primarily peer-review, the problem is the ridiculous publication pressure we're under. I'm a postdoc in the humanities and some of my colleagues publish 10+ bullshit papers in crappy journals per year - their career is virtually guaranteed, even though everybody knows and agrees that it's impossible to write that much and maintain any level of quality. It doesn't matter how bad or insignificant your work is, if you manage to push out 5+ Scopus-indexed articles per year, nobody will be able to fire you or overlook you in tenure track applications, and I see more and more people gaming the system in that way. It's leads to a horrible display of mediocricity, of course, and anyone with a genuine interest in substantial scientific research has a hard time competing. Yes, some decision makers still take quality into account, but overall there is a clearcut trend towards chickenshit and bean-counting, at least in Portugal where I currently live.