Yeah passing peer review doesn’t mean that the article is perfect and to be taken as truth now (and remember, to err is human; any coder on here has had some lo

Yeah passing peer review doesn’t mean that the article is perfect and to be taken as truth now (and remember, to err is human; any coder on here has had some long standing bug that went mostly unnoticed in their code base). It means it passed the journal’s standards for novelty, interest, and rigor based on the described methods as a retained by the editor / area chair and peer reviewers that are selected for being knowledgeable on the topic. Implicit in this process is that the authors are acting in good faith. To treat the authors as hostile is both demoralizing for the reviewers (who wants to be that cynical about their field) and would require extensive verification of each statement well beyond what is required to return the review in a timely manner. Unless your paper has mathematical theory (and mistakes do slip through), a publication should not be taken as proof of something on its own, but a data point. Over time and with enough data points, a field builds evidence to turn a hypothesis into a scientific theory.