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Peer review has become a closed system that protects shoddy and politically motivated research.
We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.” But science isn’t like a thermostat regulating your home’s temperature. It’s a human institution run by fallible human beings. Scientists and scholars are susceptible to career incentives, moral fads, groupthink and fear. When those pressures capture journals or entire fields, peer review can become less a filter for error than a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.
Modern prepublication peer review became common in the mid-20th century. At its best, peer review improves papers before publication and screens out weak work, but its usefulness depends on the quality and independence of a field’s “expert” reviewers. If reviewers have the same blind spots as the editors and authors, then a process meant to remove flaws and bias can instead facilitate them.
Decades of studies on publication bias, replication failures and political bias in the social sciences have shown that peer-reviewed papers are often less reliable than the public assumes. John Ioannidis’s famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” remains disturbing because its basic insight about the fallibility of medical research remains true. In fields that rely heavily on narrative or qualitative methods, or that touch on politicized topics (as much social science does), ideology influences which questions are asked and which conclusions are professionally acceptable.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Colin Wright is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Kevin McCaffree is an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Texas.