Peer review means "other academics read the paper and provide feedback about whether the paper is novel, important, and clear." This usually involves a couple h

Peer review means "other academics read the paper and provide feedback about whether the paper is novel, important, and clear." This usually involves a couple hours of work from the reviewer. It is woefully incapable of detecting fraudulent data. How could it? Some fraud has been caught through statistical analysis of datasets, but this takes a lot of time and requires expertise that most academics don't have. Detecting faked images has an even less clear path that people can follow. Academic fraud is bad. But it isn't like other ecosystems are more effective and capable of detecting fraudulent work. The journals suck, but mostly for reasons totally unrelated to the limitations of peer review.