The Maritime Economist Magazine Spring 2015 | Page 45

THEMARITIME Economist

skeptic & heterodox

The peer review mechanism and scientific journalism
are broadly established in the last century. In contrast
to common assumption about scientific evolution,
the practice of editorial peer reviewing did not
become general before World War II (Burnham,
1990). In addition to several benefits of peer review
process (thought to be irrefutable mechanism of
‘scientific’ journalism), there are also handicaps which
may threaten the future of science. The peer review
process may suppress anti-thesis against mainstream
perspectives.

In another story, Richard Smith (2006) tells us an
interesting experience:

Richard Horton (2000), editor of the British medical
journal The Lancet, once said:
The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer
review was any more than just a crude means of
discovering the acceptability – not the
validity – of a new finding. Editors and
scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance
of peer review. We portray peer review to the
public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to
make science our most objective truth teller.
But we know that the system of peer
review is biased, unjust, unaccountable,
incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually
ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently
wrong.

(An error also attracts other scholars to criticize and
cite the me ntioned paper, the journal gains enormous
volume of citations!)

Respectfully.

There is a huge submission volume to academic
journals with vast number of poor written papers.
It is obvious that today’s scientific world is not same
as a century ago. From this perspective, peer review
process is essential for handling submissions. It is not
only an intellectual problem, but it has also a slot
allocation side since each journal has a capacity of
publishing papers based on publisher’s financial
perspective. Even when there is an abundance of
capacity (e.g. electronic publishing), impact factor
is another dimension of paper selection process.
Therefore, quantity of papers does not imply quality
of them. However, quantity of citations really matters,
and these days, impact factor engineering through
several ways is an emerging debate of scientific
society. As Goodhart’s law indicates:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to
be a good measure.
Apart from technical and/or financial aspects, editors
need to pay attention to the potential of inhibiting
thought provoking, change-making and innovative
research based on its incoherency with the
mainstream.

ME Mag

According to Kennefick (2005), only a single paper
of Albert Einstein’s over 300 papers was subject to
peer review (with co-author, Nathan Rosen), and the
review report was negative. Then, Einstein replied to
editor as follows:
Dear Sir,
We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript
for publication and had not authorized you to show
it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to
address the -in any case erroneous- comments of your
anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I
prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

I remember feeling the effect strongly when as a
young editor I had to consider a paper submitted
to the BMJ by Karl Popper. I was unimpressed and
thought we should reject the paper. But we could
not. The power of the name was too strong. So we
published, and time has shown we were right to
do so. The paper argued that we should pay much
more attention to error in medicine…

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