Peer Review's Broken System and the Myth of Scientific Progress
This is my favourite blog article of the year. Adam Mastroianni is an academic who is unhappy with peer review. Deeply, deeply unhappy. He points out the insanity of how many articles get published every year, how opaque and undecipherable the language of academic writing is, how often fradulent papers get past peer reviews and concludes that peer review is irredeemably broken. And how low or productivity is anyway writing all these papers and reviewing them too. He also has a really punchy style and says things like:
“…And as a result, nobody actually reads these papers. Some of them are like 100 pages long with another 200 pages of supplemental information, and all of it is written like it hates you and wants you to stop reading immediately.”
Which is actually wrong. On some rare occasions where our careers depend on it, we do read those monster papers and hate ourselves as soon as we are done deciphering the hieroglyphs. The part I like the most is that he suggests scientific progress depends on the strongest links (best results) and is not actually undermined by the weakest links (bad sloppy science) that peer review protects against.
Sure! Here’s the clickable link and image in markdown format:
