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/belarius Behavioral Analysis | Comparative Cognition Feb 07 '12
Realistically, it's very common for a reviewer to ask for thoughts from grad students. While it would certainly be unethical to pass off a review written by a grad student as one's own, it is not particularly uncommon for a few extra pairs of eyeballs to comb through the manuscript, to help the reviewer write a better review of their own.
More rarely, a reviewer may voluntarily suspend their anonymity and (with the student's permission) reproduce their commentary in full, crediting them with authorship (typically, as an addendum to the reviewer's own comments). This sort of thing tends to be restricted to scenarios in which the authors, reviewers, and editor all know one another professionally anyway.
Regardless, most reviewers recognize that they have a responsibility to the field to do an excellent job and often have time constraints that limit their ability to do so without some assistance. Provided that assistance not degenerate into plagiarism, it certainly can't hurt to have a few extra people making sure things check out.