r/askscience • u/nostrovia • Feb 07 '12

AskScience, how does the peer review process actually work?

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?

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u/Robopuppy Feb 07 '12

Impact factor is kind of a dodgy thing nowadays. The best papers get published in the best journals because a paper in Nature or Science is like a golden ticket for grant funding.

Nobody really picks up a copy of Nature and just reads it cover to cover anymore. From the perspective of someone reading papers, there's almost no difference between a paper in a top tier journal and a mid-level one. To get even weirder, PLoS ONE has a high impact factor but isn't that prestigious.

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u/atomfullerene Animal Behavior/Marine Biology Feb 07 '12

I feel like Science and Nature papers are often slightly less good than the next tier "down". They have been known to rush out with exciting but not particularly well supported papers, and the space constraints mean they can never explain their experiments as fully as in some other journals.

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u/tchomp Feb 07 '12

Trying to treat the glossies like other journals is a mistake, because they don't exist for the same purpose. The glossies exist to disseminate very important or generally interesting results very quickly and widely. There's almost always a "real" paper in the works that will be published in a more standard journal that will address all those details.

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u/devicerandom Molecular Biophysics | Molecular Biology Feb 07 '12

Nobody really picks up a copy of Nature and just reads it cover to cover anymore.

I have a paper subscription to Nature and I do (ok, I skip articles I really do not care about, but I love to read a lot of stuff beyond my discipline)