It's pretty much the same. I'm sure the Hoover Institution uses some level of peer review for their papers, except those peers probably get paid to review it wh

It's pretty much the same. I'm sure the Hoover Institution uses some level of peer review for their papers, except those peers probably get paid to review it whereas academics don't. Peer review doesn't do much, it's very much getting you to first base quality wise, often not even that. It can be effective if peers are able and willing to really go deep, burn bridges and object to the core thesis of a paper. Clearly not going to be true at the Hoover Institution but equally untrue within most academic fields. Many bad papers are bad because they're actually political papers dressed up to look like science, thus (ab)using a university's reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit. I know that link claims most of them aren't. I think that's good news. But note, that's because many of the papers that replicate, only replicate because they're making vacuous observations. Of the papers that get attention because they make surprising claims, many of them are politically or ideologically motivated. Partly this depends on how widely you define politically motivated. For instance it's common for supposedly scientific papers to run a model, and then advocate for certain government policies based on the output predictions. This is political activity. It's also often not scientific because the models haven't been validated, and in fact if/when the political recommendations are acted upon it renders their predictions unfalsifiable, which a disinterested scientist should not want. This problem is much larger than grad students. Bad papers are routinely being written by career academics, professors, large groups of them.