Same but some of my friends i went to uni with is a moron who went on to do a PhD…
Its like having your work marked and, if they don’t Iike it, they’ll just say like “not clear enough” or “needs more research” and deny its publication.
I mean, what they meant was “you haven’t addressed Dr Y et. al.'s critique of that particular essay’s attempt at modelling the disease you’re researching” but they’re not just going to come out and tell you that. That would be too easy.
Every now and then I feel like I can hear them muttering some kind of highly expletive death threat at reviewer number 3.
Liz@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
For any scientific journal that’s worth anything, your article has to get approved by other scientists in your field before the journal will accept it. They’re mostly just looking for exactly what this post is referencing. Does it seem legit? If it passes a once-over by the other scientists, then it gets published.
This is why you should not trust any single study by itself. It’s just the results from one experiment that easily could have had a consequential error no one picked up. The results could be statistical noise. Hell, even rarely, you’ll get someone who’s been faking data. This is not to say “science is broken,” only that science has never relied on the results from a single unreplicated experiment to determine truth. If you read about scientists from the past, it’s fairly common for them to publish a landmark paper and for no one to care, or even for people to argue they’re wrong. Only with additional research do they get proved correct and we imagine that everyone immediately accepted this new paradigm shift off of one single paper.
Comment105@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Is there no paper publishing site where other scientists can put out publicly visible peer reviews (with the names of the reviewers attached) after the paper is published?
Liz@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
A peer review really is just someone checking for glaring errors. If a paper gets published and someone had some real beef with it, best they can do is some of their own research to prove how shitty the other team was. After that, there are some journals that will publish letters where people comment on previous articles. But generally, most articles just get mildly ignored. It’s only after a pattern of corroborating evidence piles up that people will start to say that the results of a particular early study were significant.
Mind you, the details about how this consensus process works varies from field to field. Particle physics has a different culture than hydrology. But, in general, one paper is not enough to hang your hat on.
Comment105@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I’m sorry, but this seems like a profoundly archaic, indirect, and unnecessary way to format it.
And with how brief you people seem to describe these peer reviews, they’re apparently lower effort than a good reddit comment, yet they cannot be directly publicly visibly attached to the article they are directly reviewing?
Academia can’t be too proud to take a hint of inspiration from the mitigating effects of well-informed internet comments and Twitter’s community notes against low quality content?
Why would intelligent people shackle their own publications by simulating the limitations of last century? Separately published “letters”? Honestly?
The few times I’ve heard the processes of papers and journals described, they seem to be clinging to the logistical solutions of physical paper with some kind of demented nostalgic love for the flaws of it.