Question

Why are peer reviews important

Answer 1

This is a very good question. The importance of peer review is making sure that the findings of a paper are sound. The reviewer asks awkward questions to make sure that any conclusions are based on experiments that were carried out as well as possible. Also any illogical conclusions drawn will be challenged.

Answer 2

Peer review means that your classmates judge your work. It is important from tech point of view of teaching everyone how to judge the accuracy and presentation of work.

Answer 3

If you mean professional peer reviews, e.g. reviews of articles submitted for publication, or reviews of proposals submitted to private or public agencies for grants, then there are two broad purposes:

(1) To be sure that no fraud or error that would be obvious to someone skilled in the field is present. A good reviewer can spot inconsistencies or strangeness that would suggest either. The usual procedure is then to return the article or proposal to the author for correction and resubmittal, usually to the same reviewer.

(2) To have a professional opinion on the quality and relevance of the work. Good journals can't publish all the manuscripts they receive, and in the best cases only about 1 in 10 or 20, so they must pick the best and most widely interesting papers to publish. Reviewers help clarify that for the editors. Similarly, agencies can't fund every grant proposal they get -- the success rate for NSF proposals is probably about 1 in 50, although it varies strongly with the program. The program officer seeks guidance from experts in the field about whether the proposed research should be funded, meaning whether it addresses important problems, and whether the results would be broadly useful to many other researchers, or engineers.

Additionally, a journal review also serves to ensure that the publication is clear enough so that any other worker skilled in the field can reproduce the work. That is, the reviewer makes sure the authors haven't left out important steps, or failed to note this or that condition, so that other people can duplicate the work, which is the only way of fully verifying it. A similar charge to the proposal reviewer is to evaluate whether the work proposed can be plausibly accomplished with the resources either already in place at the place of research, or contained in the proposal to be funded, and within the time specified. The agency does not want to fund proposals without a realistic plan for how they will accomplish what they set out to do.

In sum, peer review is valuable because it prevents obvious fraud and error (subtle fraud and error is found out by duplication, or the failure to duplicate, results by other workers). Because it helps make the most interesting and useful work get the widest circulation. Because it helps managers (editors and program managers) allocate scarce resources (pages or dollars) efficiently.

A lot is said about peer review as a means to prevent nonsense from gaining ascendancy, and people appeal to "scientific consensus" as being valuable. This is garbage. Peer review can prevent *obvious* nonsense from gaining ascendancy, but it can do nothing to prevent plausible nonsense. In the 18th century, for example, the idea that burning represented the release of phlogiston was broadly believed, and if you came along and suggested burning was *instead* the combining of materials with oxygen, a hitherto unknown component of air, "peer review" and the "scientific consensus" would have said you were nuts.

That's why a good scientist pays zero attention to "scientific consensus," because it's just mob opinion, and the mob has many more ways to be wrong than right. Nor does the good scientist count on peer review to prevent fads and subtle error -- instead, he relies on it to enforce clear and consistent communication of experimental results, so that he can duplicate the work if he wants. The good scientist relies ONLY on duplication of work by independent researchers (preferably who hate each other and want to prove each other wrong) as the gold standard of what is likely to be true.