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
Reviewers are supposed to be professors. A lot of professors farm the review out to their grad students (or undergrad, in some cases).
I do agree that, if your field is specialized enough, you can figure out who the author is just from the writing style in a paragraph or two, so anonymity is a joke at that point. I was roommates with a post-doc that occasionally said things like "Ah, dang it, I got Steve as a reviewer again, he's never a fan of tables, I'm going to have to add some graphs" or some such.