Let’s talk about peer review
The pros and cons of peer review…
Peer reviewing is a comprehensive and detailed process that allows for experts and researchers worldwide (essentially a third party) to fully analyze and evaluate a piece of work before it is officially published onto a journal or database. Surprisingly enough, this system has been around for centuries now and has continued to evolve. Although this definition sounds rather perfect and beneficial overall for everyone, there are still certain critiques, limitations, and flaws to this current system. Even though peer review has become a standardized step before anything is ready to be published, there are still numerous concerns and questions about it, particularly regarding privilege, marginalization, and improvements that need to be made.
In a 1997 article titled, The effectiveness of journal peer review, by Robert H. Fletcher, a Harvard professor, and his wife Suzanne W. Fletcher, an internist and clinical epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health, they reveal the effectiveness, positives, and negatives regarding the peer reviewing system. The major positive regarding this process as Fletcher outlines is the level of detail and strict structure. There are various aspects from detecting fraud to analyzing details, that trained reviewers look for. A normal peer review consists of “one to three reviewers per manuscript, a time deadline for returning reviews, authors do not know reviewers’ names and institutions” (Fletcher 63), which is rather impressive, yet does not mean that all manuscripts or authors are given that same chance or privilege, which is where the issue lies. Whose voices and works are privileged in the world of academia, particularly in the peer reviewing system? There are certain scholars who have more of an advantage when it comes to their works being reviewed due to prestige and their reputation.
In a generation where articles are constantly being written and research is constantly being done, there should not be any privilege when it comes to reviewing these works as everyone should be given the same chance to express their voices and interests in whatever field. Likewise, in an article titled The ups and downs of peer review, which can be found on the American Physiological Society Journal, it was noted that the biggest criticism pointed at the peer review process dealt with “bias towards certain authors, inability to detect major flaws, and inability to uncover corruption/scientific misconduct”. The bias not only dealt with reputation of the author, but in some cases author gender bias among reviewers was also discussed, which is shocking. It seems that there most definitely lies some privilege and not everyone is given the equal opportunity in terms of their works, and some works are not reviewed in the same manner as others. This brings up the thought of marginalization, in that there is bias when reviewing authors’ works. This scholarly marginalization needs to be eliminated because this would be one great improvement in the peer review world.
In addition to equal review of various authors’ works, in order to make peer review even more effective, ethics is one aspect that needs to be readjusted. Once these minor changes are gradually made, then the next focus would be to increase availability at a lower cost. Peer reviewing overall is an effective and reliable method of improving, evaluating, and enhancing authors’ works, it just needs to become more equally sound and less marginalized. As information continues to develop, this must also be the case when reviewing them and giving people access to them as well.
Fletcher, Robert H., and Suzanne W. Fletcher. “The Effectiveness of Journal Peer Review.” Science and Engineering Ethics 3.1 (1997): 62–75. Springer Link. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
