An interesting article on peer review

Peer Review Is Science’s Wheel of Misfortune

Unfortunately, peer review has problems that run deeper than the quality of any particular reviewer.
The process is inconsistent and subjective to the degree that — in the words of Richard Smith,
a former editor of the British Medical Journal — it’s “something of a lottery.”

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longview said:

Peer Review Is Science’s Wheel of Misfortune

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It's easy enough to complain about peer review. I've got some experience with it through my wife, and it's often kind of silly, people who are good at publishing are good at playing the game, it's probably NOT anonymous, as is claimed, because the big researchers in a particular small area are well known and they will often present the papers more than once at conferences before submission, meaning the reviewers paying attention likely have seen the paper and know the authors, with famous ones getting a kind of free pass, etc. The hard part is figuring out a better way.

But, yeah, it's a problem. Contributing to it are the college rankings that use publications in 'A' or top journals as a measuring stick, so colleges put a VERY high priority on that as well. At the local university, an A publication (one of the top 5 journals) in one department gets a bonus of something like $25k, while in a B or C next to nothing, but that's a reflection of how important outside 'ratings' groups weigh the publication record. If you want your university to be a "top 10" or whatever, or your department to be highly ranked, which matters to donors and employers, then you hire people who publish in the top journals, period. Again, an example locally is in one department they hired a professor from a peer college not unlike the NFL would hire away a top QB and the wife teaches NO classes. She cowrites articles with PhD students, and has a big name, and gets lots of "A" hits, and she's paid huge bucks for them. Also, since she's a big name with lots of A hits, she attracts the cream of the crop in that field for PhD candidates.

[h=1]Hilarious Peer Reviewed Climate Hoax: "The conceptual penis as a social construct"[/h][FONT=&quot]Guest essay by Eric Worrall From the “phallic climate model” department, h/t James Delingpole / Breitbart – a pair of hoaxers have demonstrated that random garbage, some of it computer generated, can pass academic peer review – providing it seems to conform to left wing social prejudices about masculinity, capitalism and climate change. THE CONCEPTUAL PENIS…
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May 20, 2017 in Bad science.

Weekend reads: Top journals under scrutiny; a toxic legacy; science by press release

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
It was a particularly busy week at Retraction Watch, featuring retractions from four of the top journals in the world:

• A retraction from Nature
• The retraction of an Annals of Internal Medicine paper claiming masks didn’t halt the spread of COVID-19
• A group of anesthesiologists losing 10 papers at once
• Retractions from NEJM and Lancet of highly influential COVID-19 papers

Jack Hays said:

Weekend reads: Top journals under scrutiny; a toxic legacy; science by press release

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Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
It was a particularly busy week at Retraction Watch, featuring retractions from four of the top journals in the world:

• A retraction from Nature
• The retraction of an Annals of Internal Medicine paper claiming masks didn’t halt the spread of COVID-19
• A group of anesthesiologists losing 10 papers at once
• Retractions from NEJM and Lancet of highly influential COVID-19 papers

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How is all of this weighted against the overwhelming preponderance of published articles that require no retraction?

MamboDervish said:

How is all of this weighted against the overwhelming preponderance of published articles that require no retraction?

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It's not. But Retraction Watch, founded with a MacArthur Genius Grant, was a reaction to science's "reproducibility crisis" of a few years back.