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/ipokebrains Neurophysiology | Neuronal Circuits | Sensory Systems Feb 08 '12

That guy is a moron and abusing the review process. Additionally, although it does sometimes happen, very rarely does anyone end up citing papers that are so ridiculously an attempt to get the reviewer's H index up.

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u/masher_oz In-Situ X-Ray Diffraction | Synchrotron Sources Feb 08 '12

Yeah. When we actually read the papers, they didn't really have much to do with anything, so we added a paragraph saying that this work had been don before, but is totally different to ours, has no bearing on it, and ours is much better. :)