Re: OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

On Aug 9, 7:22 am, Kris Krieger <m...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
James Arthur <bogusabd...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in8x0nk.402$ZV1.380@trnddc07:">news:8x0nk.402$ZV1.380@trnddc07:



bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 7, 3:53 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
James Arthur wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
[...]

 I haven't noticed Steve McIntyre, or
anybody else with concerns about the quality of refereeing in
scientific journals, ever coming up with scheme for paying
referees for the time they put in on reading and trying to
understand other people's papers. At the moment the people who put
in the time get very little back for their work, and this time
could more productively be invested in work that will get them
publications, grant money and promotion.
"... that will get them publications, grant money and promotion".
That is a nearly perfect description for a publish-or-parish gravy
train mentality. And that's part of this whole problem. or in plain
English: Selfishness.

We happen to live in a selfish society.
Publishers like Elsevier who charge big bucks for the academic
journals they publish, while paying nothing to the referees who do
the quality control that makes the journals worth those big bucks,
presumably also rate as selfish.

That's the most damning description of peer-review I've heard.
If the reviewers aren't interested and don't have the time, maybe
they shouldn't do it.
Exactamente.

Nevertheless, enough people do it, and do it well enough, that we do
seem to have a growing body of useful scientific knowledge.

If you don't like the system, you are welcome to devise a scheme that
might work better, and spend the time, effort and money required to
get it working in competition with the existing structure.

No Bill, what you describe is a corruption, a sham, not peer-review.

Peer review is no guarantee of quality or accuracy--as it's intended
to be and as you've touted it--if the reviewers aren't actually
examining the data, methods, and checking calculations for errors.

By your description peer review is worthless; a Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval would be better; at least those products are
checked for quality before being endorsed.

Cheers,
James Arthur

I know someone who's published a number of scientific papers, and it's my
understanding that the people who review papers on a given topic are
knowledgeable enough so that they don't *have* to redo everything - they
can spot methodological problems, wrroneous calculations, disjuncts of
logic, and other erros without literally sitting down and redoing it all.

Part of being an expert is having a certain dataset pretty much committed
to memory.

The *problems* with experts are that
1) they don't always know data/info that exists outside tehir area of
expertise but might relate to a given expereiment or submitted paper, and
2) they might not recognize a paradigm shift.

So, peer review usually does examine data, methods, and calculations for
errors.

The part you got right is that it doesn't necessarily guarantee quality -
a paper/experiment can be error-free, yet still be "junk" in that it
deals with soemthign trivial - meaning, doesn't explore any new aspects
of what's already been done a zillion times; for example, an experiment
which overfed mice using soem specific brand of feed, and then concluded
that "consumption of Feed X in excess of caloric expenditure led to
obesity in this population of mice".  It's trivial, but not in error.

That kind of trivial result shouldn't get published - one of the
criteria in the Institute of Physics instructions to refereees is
whether the paper advances knowledge in the area.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
.

Relevant Pages

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