原文：
It’s worth noting that “peer review” can encompass
different things.
Peer review describes the formal process through which manuscripts that have
been submitted to journal editors are then sent to reviewers with relevant
expertise for their evaluation. These reviewers then reply to the journal
editors with their evaluation of the manuscript — whether it should be accepted,
resubmitted after revision, or rejected — and their comments on particular
aspects of the manuscript (this conclusion would be more solid if it were
supported by this kind of analysis of the data, that data looks more equivocal
than the authors seem to think it is, this part of the materials and methods is
confusingly written, the introduction could be much more concise, etc., etc.).
The editor passes on the feedback to the author, the author responds to that
feedback (either by making changes in the manuscript or by presenting the editor
with a persuasive argument that what a reviewer is asking for is off base or
unreasonable), and eventually the parties end up with a version of the paper
deemed good enough for publication (or the author gives up, or tries to get a
more favorable hearing from another journal).
This flavor of peer review is very much focused on
making sure that papers published in scientific journals meet a certain standard
of quality or acceptability to the other scientists who will be reading those
papers. There’s a lot of room for disagreement about what sort of quality is
produced here, about how conservative reviewers can be when faced with new ideas
or approaches, about how often reviewer judgments can be overturned by the
judgment of editors (and whether that is on balance a good thing or a bad
thing). As
we’ve discussed before, the quality control here does not typically include
reviewers actually trying to replicate the experiments described in the
manuscripts they are reviewing.
Still, there’s something about peer review that a great many scientists think
is important, at least when they want to be able to consult the literature in
their discipline. If you want to see how your results fit with the results that
others are reporting in similar lines of research, or if you’re looking for
promising instrumental or theoretical approaches to a tenacious scientific
puzzle, it’s good to have some reason to trust what’s reported
in the literature. Otherwise, you have to do all the verification yourself.
And this is where a sort of peer review becomes important to the essence of
science…
The scientist, looking at the world and trying to figure out some bit of it,
is engaged in theorizing and observing, in developing hunches and then testing
those hunches. The scientist wants to end up with a clearer understanding of how
that bit of the world is behaving, and of what could explain that behavior.
And ultimately, the scientist relies on others to get that clearer
understanding.
To really trust our observations, they need to be observations
that others could make as well. To really buy our own explanations for what we
observe, we need to be ready to put those explanations out for the inspection of
others who might find some flaw in them, some untested assumption that doesn’t
hold up to close scrutiny.
Science may be characterized by an attitude toward the world, an attitude
that gets us asking particular kinds of questions, but the systematic approach
to answering these questions requires the participation of other people working
with the same basic assumptions about how we can engage with the world to
understand it better. Those other people are peers, and their participation is a
kind of review.
