Peer Review- Why Everyone Should Know About It

Peer Review is one of the key processes that holds modern science together. To most people, however, it sounds like a school teacher telling the class to mark each others homework. Why the big secret?

Over the first couple of months of my PhD, it has been stressed a few times how important publishing is in academia these days. Publishing is the metric by which our output is judged.

Whilst it isn't necessary for a student to publish papers over the course of their PhD, I think it's fair to say that it is strongly encouraged. Okay, but if science is about publishing, then what's the difference between science and journalism? Why don't I just twist some statistics a little bit and go for a sensational headline like "Demise of the Amazon will Spin Global Climate Out of Control"?  Peer review is the process that keeps things in check, i.e. that ensures science is produced using sound data, transparent methods, rigorous statistics, and sticks to objective conclusions.

It works something like this. When scientist or group of scientists wants to share their findings, they work on a manuscript that clearly states how the did their work and their line of reasoning, as well as their conclusions and a critical discussion on how sound those conclusions are. Once they are happy with a draft, they send it to the editor of a journal. The editor then sends the draft paper to a few people who weren't involved with that piece of work, but who are experts in that field of research. These people are the 'peer reviewers'.

Nothing gets published until the editor and the reviewers reach a consensus that the science is sound- this might involve months of editing or even further experiments. Thanks to this process, the rest of the scientific community can then be fairly confident that anything published in a reputable journal represents the best efforts and knowledge of a field at the time.

In an ideal, world, after peer review would also be the point at which journalists are contacted about important discoveries and results that are relevant to the wider public. That way, everyone would benefit from the peer review process.

However, as it stands, most people don't know that peer review is the gold standard of scientific reliability! When you last read a piece about science in the newspaper, did you check to see if they had made reference to a peer reviewed journal? Critically, not knowing about peer review renders the public powerless in distinguishing between a rigorous scientific result, and the speculations or opinions of an individual scientist (such as this blog).

What's more, until last week, I didn't really understand how peer review works myself. After a workshop on the topic run by the charity Sense About Science, I left wondering why some basic training on the peer review system wasn't included in any of our undergraduate courses or initial PhD training.

The Sense About Science workshop highlighted that the peer review certainly isn't perfect- it relies heavily on the goodwill of reviewers, and can be vulnerable to bias, nepotism and discrimination as well being a long and inefficient process. The point is, though, that for the most part it is the ultimate form of quality control in scientific publishing. So let's not keep quiet about it- young researchers should know what to expect before they start writing their first manuscripts, and the public should know about it so they can critically evaluate scientific evidence when it appears in media.