4 ms·
The quickest path towards realize peer review means almost nothing is... reading peer reviewed papers. Of course, take my semi-anonymous random internet opinio
by goostavos 6y ago
The quickest path towards realize peer review means almost nothing is... reading peer reviewed papers.
Of course, take my semi-anonymous random internet opinion with a grain of salt (I've dropped out of college not once, but _twice_, so what do I know?). However, I'm moderately good at computer science topics, and have spent the last year reading and implementing papers in detail in pursuit of a fairly niche topic, and, what I was dismayed to find, is that most papers are absolute, complete and utter garbage. Like, honesty embarrassing. And that's before you even get into the fact that _you can't reproduce their results_.
Encountering this has been something of a crisis in my entire belief system, to be honest. Although, maybe I've just been exposed to what "real" science looks like: a big, gross, often wrong mess of assumptions about the world that takes a long, long time to correct.
- sideshowb 6y agoI suspect if you think this of most papers you've either stumbled into a really bad cluster, or you've missed something about the purpose of the papers you've read. I would agree that some papers are terrible though, I've seen a few I would never have let through review including in the very top journals. I like the Plos mega journal approach but we can't do away with peer review altogether otherwise what separates science from the conspiracy posts that circulate on Facebook ...