3 ms·

If anything the pandemic made clear that science absolutely requires peer review, otherwise opinions get elevated to facts and at the end the reputation of scie

• makomk 5y ago
  One of the worst hydroxychloroquine studies - the now-retracted one in the Lancet claiming that patients receiving the drug were dying at a higher rate, which appears to have used completely fake data and where there was no possible way they could've got the data they purported to have used - was in fact peer reviewed. Peer review really doesn't do as much as people seem to think it does.
  • xg15 5y ago
    So then what? Even if peer review does not solve the problem of bad research completely, it certainly mitigates it better than not doing anything. How would you solve this problem?
    • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      By attributing less weight to the imprimatur of peer review. It's a sign that something might well hold up, but it's not definitive. I think people know this about their own field, and then immediately forget it when dealing with another field.
    • User23 5y ago
      > Even if peer review does not solve the problem of bad research completely, it certainly mitigates it better than not doing anything. This isn't self-evident. In fact, it's conceivable that peer review could actually lower the quality of published research by delaying paradigm shifting work from seeing the light of day.
    • IncRnd 5y ago
      How? If someone is going to rely upon the conclusions of a paper, simply read that paper and evaluate the claims. i.e. stop the sole use of the titles of papers and their cliffs notes to support a point.
    • bazooka_penguin 5y ago
      I think the problem people are getting is that "peer reviewed" has become a badge of expertise or authority in itself, inflating people's trust in it and weakening skepticism.
  • AwaAwa 5y ago
    The problem is that "peers" of a like mind are easily found, when churning papers is rewarded. Quantity beats Quality in today's world.
  • tinus_hn 5y ago
    Peer review can’t catch fake data. Peer review can look at if an experiment is repeatable and repeating the experiment can show fake data.
    • beagle3 5y ago
      Peer review definitely could and should have caught the fake data in this case - there were too many implausible things about this paper that one could verify with a google search and see cannot be right. In fact, it took people about one day from publication to start pointing them out with proof - and these people were (supposedly) less qualified than the peer reviewers. It is true that, with properly faked data, a reviewer cannot be expected to catch it. Nor can p-hacking generally be discovered from an incomplete description. But quite a bit of faked and even p-hacked data is less-than-competently done in a way that a reviewer can and should be able to catch; And observational data or meta-study are much easier to verify, since no experiment was done by the researcher either.
• throawayu7748 5y ago
  It is ridiculous to think covid-19 could have originated in a lab’ Have there been any peer-reviewed studies that unambiguously admit the possibility that Covid-19 may have originated in a lab? Although I think it's something that needs serious consideration, the alleged lack of Medical Reliable Sources (basically medical journal articles) is being used aggressively by a small group of editors on Wikipedia to enforce the line that a lab leak is "conspiracy theory".
  • rurban 5y ago
    There's the https://drasticresearch.org/ https://drasticresearch.org/ group, which follows the lab theory. They unambiguously admit the possibility.