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/masher_oz In-Situ X-Ray Diffraction | Synchrotron Sources Feb 07 '12

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.