Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Most people, including scientists, assume peer review has always been a crucial feature of scientific publication, but its history is more complicated. Although in the seventeenth century the Royal Society tended to ask some of its members whether they thought a paper was interesting enough to publish in Philosophical Transactions, requiring them to provide a written evaluation of each study wasn’t tried until at least 1831.15 Even then, the formal peer review system we know today didn’t become universal until well into the twentieth century (as you can tell from a letter Albert Einstein sent in 1936 to the editors of Physical Review, huffily announcing that he was withdrawing his paper from consideration at their journal because they had dared to send it to another physicist for comment).16 It took until the 1970s for all journals to adopt the modern model of sending out submissions to independent experts for peer review, giving them the gatekeeping role they have today.17 Peer reviewers are usually anonymous, which is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it allows them to speak their minds without concern about repercussions from the scientists whose work they’re criticising (a junior scientist can be truly honest about the flaws of a big-name professor’s work), but a curse because, well, it allows them to speak their minds without concern about repercussions from the scientists whose work they’re criticising. The following are genuine excerpts from peer revie...