Lay people seem to think peer review is some sort of objective process... but back in the day when I was involved with these kinds of papers, it was very politi

Lay people seem to think peer review is some sort of objective process... but back in the day when I was involved with these kinds of papers, it was very political. First thing peer review did was screen papers for "political correctness". Thus if you had an innovative theory and a major proponent of a different, possibly established but quite wrong, theory was on the peer panel, your paper wouldn't get published..... but you might get an "opportunity" to do some further research in partnership with that "peer" that "attempts to reconcile the two theories"... his name needing to be on the resulting paper, "of course" and "first". Fortunately we worked on a team with a publicly well known heavy hitter and he was able to swing enough weight to keep our papers from being squashed.