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Personally, I've come to think of the peer-review process as a big reinforcer of the publish or perish culture in academia. Merit review committees are encoura

Personally, I've come to think of the peer-review process as a big reinforcer of the publish or perish culture in academia. Merit review committees are encouraged to rely on the count (and IF scores) of published peer-reviewed papers to measure impact, allowing them to depend on the peer-review publishing process to mint tokens signifying the value of a researcher. While this saves the committees time and gives them an excuse to not actually evaluate the content of the researcher's output, there are costs to researchers. For good and careful scientists, the peer review process rarely adds much value to the original submission, yet requires a lot of tedious work and energy responding to minor concerns. That time and energy could be spent doing more research. Peer-review adds its most value to bad manuscripts of bad research, where good reviewers coach the authors on how to do science better. This also takes up a lot of time. If I could do it my way, I'd rather publish to an archive and move on once I feel that the research is to my satisfaction.

daveguy 2y ago
For good and careful scientists, unless you communicate a design and results than can be reviewed, other good and careful scientists will reject your work. That is the nature of good and careful science.
kittikitti 2y ago
Lately I've found that this site over relies on non peer reviewed papers. Also, the Arxiv moderation process relies heavily on existing author reputation. I think your categorization of good scientists as people who don't appreciate the peer review process leaves much to be desired. My personal experience is that peer review is the majority of the scientific process and if it feels tedious then your work is part of the mechanics you yourself admonish. In order to protect against misinformation, at the very least, this question about whether or not there's peer review is necessary.

daveguy 2y ago

For good and careful scientists, unless you communicate a design and results than can be reviewed, other good and careful scientists will reject your work. That is the nature of good and careful science.

kittikitti 2y ago

Lately I've found that this site over relies on non peer reviewed papers. Also, the Arxiv moderation process relies heavily on existing author reputation. I think your categorization of good scientists as people who don't appreciate the peer review process leaves much to be desired. My personal experience is that peer review is the majority of the scientific process and if it feels tedious then your work is part of the mechanics you yourself admonish. In order to protect against misinformation, at the very least, this question about whether or not there's peer review is necessary.