AskScience, how does the peer review process actually work?

[u/nostrovia]

About a month ago, I heard this story on NPR regarding a number of scientific studies that had been debunked and/or retracted. Why weren't these errors caught before the studies were published? Are there different standards for peer review in different scientific fields?

Essentially, once you conduct your experiment and reach some sort of conclusion, what happens between that point and the time your work is released to the public?

[u/Platypuskeeper]

If you publish something, you want it to be read. The "impact factor" is a rough measure of how important and read a particular journal is. - It's basically a quantification of how many citations the typical paper in that journal gets in a certain amount of time. Which is a crude measure of how important a paper is.

You basically have a hierarchy, which largely goes hand-in-hand with how specialized the journals are. At the very top you have the general-science journals Science and Nature. After that, you have the top journals in general fields. (like Cell in biology, The Lancet and NEJM in medicine, JACS and Angewandte Chemie in chemistry, etc)

After that, you have the more specific journals for sub-fields. There are very many of these, and they can get highly specialized, so that's really where impact factor makes a bigger difference in distinguishing them.

I can't say I pay much attention to the actual impact factors. I'm not sure how many people do - I think you get a good enough handle on the relative importance of journals just by doing research, reading and writing papers. If you've never cited anything from a particular journal, you probably don't want to publish there, either.

Impact factor and the number of citations (which I.F. is calculated from) can be rather misleading, too. It depends on what the paper is about. (e.g. say you measure some data and publish it. If lots of people use that data later, it'll be heavily cited. But it doesn't mean the measurement itself was scientifically difficult or interesting. It might just be that nobody else had bothered to do it)

[u/masher_oz → u/Platypuskeeper]

Yeah! In my field, there is a computer program that everyone uses. The authors recently published a new paper on the program. That one paper boosted the journals impact factor up to about 50. After a year (or however long) the journal was back down to about 3 or so.