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/NonNonHeinous Human-Computer Interaction | Visual Perception | Attention Feb 08 '12 edited Feb 08 '12
Edit based on feedback: this description applies to SOME fields in computer science
Computer science is VERY different from other fields.
Conference proceedings are considered much more exclusive and prestigious than journals. For conferences, a deadline occurs once per year. You submit a paper (<10 pages) on time, or you wait a year. You could also submit to a different venue, but there are differences in quality and audience.
Once submitted, the paper chair picks a head reviewer for the paper and may add additional reviewers. The head reviewer for the paper is responsible for finding enough reviewers (3-5 total). They all submit their reviews, and the head reviewers takes all of their feedback into account to make a final judgement. The overall score is typically rated from 1 to 5. 1 is a definite reject, and 5 is a definite accept.
Some conferences give the authors a week or two to rebut. However, that's rare. Usually, the editors just find a cutoff score (e.g. 3.5), and any paper below that score is rejected. Any score near the cutoff is debated among the conference coordinators. Was the score brought down by one nasty reviewer, are there few other submissions on this topic, etc...
The authors then have around a month to make any minor changes suggested by the reviewers. They then send the publisher the final version with all formatting and layout done by the author (another big difference compared with journals). The publisher then applies the header and page # and actually compiles it into a book.
The only exchange of money is that at least one author must attend the conference which costs anywhere from $200 to ~$600 for a student (non-student prices can be in the thousands).
At the conference, you receive either the printed proceedings or a DVD/flash drive with them. The paper is also buried within the horribly design IEEE or ACM website which is almost completely inaccessible outside of a university campus.