Part of being a college student is learning to use peer reviewed articles to support ideas and claims in papers and research. Many of us hold the expectation that these articles are thoroughly researched and present trustworthy data. However, this is not always the case, as explored in the Vox.com article Let’s Stop Pretending Peer Review Works. In the article the authors question why scientists even bother with peer review if it doesn’t always produce reliable information. They highlight multiple studies with evidence that peer review doesn’t work much better than chance at allowing only high-quality studies to be published. This leads me to question how can we as students determine the reliability of peer-reviewed articles and data.
“The idea behind peer review is simple: It’s supposed to weed out bad science” –Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman
Many believe that peer review is a necessary means of quality control in research but others vastly disagree. In the aforementioned Vox article, Lancet editor Richard Horton is quoted to have said that peer review “is unjust, unaccountable … often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.” There are many things that peer review does and doesn’t do, so I think both sides make valid arguments, but without a peer review process who knows what kind of data would be published. Assessing the quality of data cannot be easy. Peer reviewers don’t repeat studies or dig deep into every aspect of a submitted study. They surely can’t uncover every act of misconduct. However, that doesn’t mean that peer review is unnecessary.
Even though peer review doesn’t always work the good news is that bad science does get caught and retractions are made. However the implication of people reading bogus information is that the data is already out there and this can have lasting effects. For example, the research article that claimed vaccines cause autism was redacted, but the information had already been read and spread. Every once in awhile I still hear someone use that study as a reason for not vaccinating their children, but once information is out there it’s hard to take it back.
“Let’s stop pretending that once a paper is published, it’s scientific gospel” – Ivan Oransky, Medical Journalist
Many college students, including myself, will spend countless hours lost in peer-reviewed articles, so it’s important to keep in mind that the data presented may not be factual. While peer review isn’t perfect and we shouldn’t take research data that has been vetted through the process at face value, that doesn’t mean we should disregard it either. Just like with any data, peer-reviewed or not, we should remember that any information can be wrong. The best way to go about using the data we find in peer-reviewed articles is to remain skeptical and critically assess anything we intend to use and reference.
References Belluz, Julia, and Steven Hoffman. “Let’s Stop Pretending Peer Review Works.” Vox.com, Vox Media, 7 Dec. 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/12/7/9865086/peer-review-science-problems.
Data/Society/Decision-making Spring 2019 