https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/does-the-current-%e2%80%9cpeer-review%e2%80%9d-system-invite-deception/2010/06/03 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:01:20 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/does-the-current-%e2%80%9cpeer-review%e2%80%9d-system-invite-deception/2010/06/03/comment-page-1#comment-430002 Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:01:20 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=9068#comment-430002 This posting raises some interesting questions. Personally, I see a considerable contrast between my own experiences of peer review, both as scholar having gotten papers published via peer review and as reviewer, and reports of some of the blatant abuses that do get reported (though I’m not familiar with the ones mentioned in the piece). While I’ve encountered my share of what I felt to be unfair criticism, I also feel that both my own papers and some of the papers that I reviewed were improved as a result of the process, and I know that some papers where I recommended rejection were indeed not published. This contrast may be in part because I’m a geographer (in environmental/economic geography) rather than in the biomedical sciences, where it seems the big scandals most frequently occur. But why would scandals more frequently occur in some disciplines than in others? Are they reported more frequently where fraud may have a direct impact on human health? Or are the rewards of fraud, or the pressures that make fraud look attractive, greater in some fields than in others? Can peer review work in areas of academe where the “publish or perish” pressures are less severe, but not in those where they are severe?
Overall, I think that competitive pressures in academia have been increasing dramatically. I am amazed at the number of publications of some people who have just gotten their Ph.D.s; in contrast to them my cv at the time when I got my Ph.D. in 1998 was very slim, and with such a cv one would probably not get a tenure track job today – maybe not even a temporary teaching position at a university. The increased competition results from more people getting doctorates, fewer good positions being advertised, and from many people working incredibly hard to get out all those articles. And just like the competitive pressures of the Tour de France, for example, promote fraud in the form of doping, the extreme competitive pressures of a “publish or perish” system surely also promote fraud in research.
One might then also ask whether the real problem is not the inadequacies of peer review, but the extreme competitive pressures which academics themselves have helped generate? And how might those competitive pressures be reduced, fostering a greater sense of collegiality and mutual support in the process?

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