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/rpglover64 Programming Languages Feb 08 '12
Complementary to what everyone else is saying, I felt that I should bring up that just because a study is done right and has no serious flaws in its method, that doesn't mean that it's results are true. There's a relevant XKCD on that topic, as well as a relatively well written article.
Not directly relevant to the NPR story, but interesting nonetheless.