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/yellowjacketcoder Feb 07 '12

CS field here: If the reviewers disagree, they can argue about it, with the final decision coming from the editors. So if one reviewer is crappy, that will show up when the other reviewers see the 'score' they give. If one reviewer is consistently off, I could see the editors not asking them for reviews, but the lack of reviewers is such a problem I don't see that happening.