JOURNAL INDIAN ASSOCIATION OF SEDIMENTOLOGISTS ISSN NO 2582 – 2020

Vol. 39, Issue 1, 2022, pp. 3-24

DOI: https://doi.org/10.51710/jias.v39i1.243

The Peer-Review Problem: a sedimentological perspective

Abstract:

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicists of all time, had a deep disdain for peer review. The peer-review process, introduced over a thousand years ago in Syria and fully formalized by the Royal Society of London during 1665-1752, is an integral part of quality control in publishing articles and in awarding research grants. However, there are many lingering problems, which include: 1) anointed experts, 2) blind peer reviews, 3) delays, 4) orthodoxy, 5) bias, 6) groupthink, 7) Peer rejection of ideas (including Nobel-Prize winners), 8) inconsistency, 9) politics, 10) fake peer review and plagiarism, 11) “Sham peer review” in the U.S. medical community, 12) settling old scores, 13) online publications, 14) acknowledgements, 15) controversies in geological sciences, and 16) imbalance of peer reviewers in the biomedical research. Transparency, which is the underpinning trait of science journalism, is lost in the secrecy of blind peer review. Under the blind peer review, there are at least eight examples of scientific papers that were rejected before going on to win a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, there are 33 striking cases of peer rejection in science, including the notorious theory of “continental drift” by Alfred Wegener. My own examples of papers in process sedimentology and petroleum geology show that the same manuscript was rejected by one journal, but was accepted by another, suggesting that the blind peer review is obsolete. A solution is to adopt an Open Peer Review (OPR). Barring an open peer review, an alternative path is to publishing the entire peer-review comments and recommended decisions of all reviewers (anonymous and identified) at the end of a paper. This practice not only would force the anonymous reviewer to be objective and accountable but also would allow the entire peer-review process to be transparent.

Keywords: Blind peer review; Fake peer review; Open peer review; Biomedical literature; Nobel-Prize winners; Orthodoxy; Plagiarism; Peer rejection; Bias; Copernicus; Galilei; Oldenberg; The Royal Society; Journal of Sedimentary Research

Introduction

The issue of peer review is much more strident in medical, biomedical, and other natural sciences than in geological sciences. The practice of peer review, since it was first introduced by a physician named Shaq bin Ali al-Rahway of Syria (854-931 CE) (Kelly, 2014), has become a self-regulating mechanism for controlling quality of articles in journals by experts (peers) in a given domain. At present in 2022, journals adopt a double-blind review process in which the identities of both the author and the reviewer are masked in maintaining objectivity. Although popular, the peer-review process is not without problems. For example, Richard Smith, MD, former editor of the British Medical Journal, stated that “So we have little evidence on the effectiveness of peer review, but we have considerable evidence on its defects. In addition to being poor at detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused.” Richard Horton (2000), the current Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal, has written in the Medical Journal of Australia that “The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability – not the validity – of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.” During the past 50 years, in publishing over 200 peer-reviewed works, I have encountered many peer-review problems in geological journals. The peer review is so deeply entrenched in publishing articles and in awarding research grants; it is impractical to abolish the entire peer-review system today. However, it is possible to improve the system. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to identify inherent problems associated with peer-review process (Wennerås and World, 1997; Ronnie, 2003; Smith, 2006; Scissor, 2016; Jana, 2019, among others) and to provide solutions to improve the current system. However, this article is not a comprehensive review of peer review per se. Furthermore, I have commonly used my own publications and experiences in this review because I am most familiar with them, but geoscientists who publish could probably supply multiple examples of their own. This review is an attempt to explore peer-review problems with a geological/sedimentological perspective.

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