Peer review can help improve a paper (and it has improved some of mine); however, contrary to some popular notions, it doesn't lend "truth" to a paper. Peer re

Peer review can help improve a paper (and it has improved some of mine); however, contrary to some popular notions, it doesn't lend "truth" to a paper. Peer reviewers are not monitoring how experiments were conducted, they only have access to a data set that is by necessity already highly selected from all the work that went into producing the final manuscript. The authors thus bear ultimate responsibility. When considering published work close to mine, I use my own judgement of the work, regardless of peer review or which journal it is published in (for example it may be in a PhD thesis). For work where I am not so familiar with the methodologies, I prefer to wait for independent verification/replication (direct or indirect) from a different research group, which ideally used different methods.