> (And I'm aware of examples of bad research, retracted papers, etc, these are mostly issues for laypeople and the media, they have almost no impact on research

> (And I'm aware of examples of bad research, retracted papers, etc, these are mostly issues for laypeople and the media, they have almost no impact on researchers and occur with insignificant frequency) I think these issues occur far more frequently than is appreciated. To me, peer review is more of a facade than a filter. The vast majority of the time, the review is superficial. I think most researchers have false confidence in the quality of the reviews, and should be more skeptical of published papers. During my PhD I spent a fair amount of time working through various papers in my field and I was surprised by how many of them had serious flaws that were unnoticed. Even highly cited papers could have major issues. For example, see this comment I put on PubPeer on a paper that is very well cited in my field: https://pubpeer.com/publications/95455FA4147A9CBD5EAA5185D21DAC https://pubpeer.com/publications/95455FA4147A9CBD5EAA5185D21... These errors I noticed in this paper are quite basic and I'm disappointed to apparently be the first one to notice. You don't need to do a deep analysis to notice the errors. Now, I'm not arguing that we should eliminate peer review or anything like that. This is mostly a response to the view that bad research is uncommon and does not have a major impact on science. I personally think that peer review should be reformed, though I don't have clear ideas about how yet.