The system of peer review in science has become corrupted, with rorts such as rampant cross-authoring (putting names of non-contributing colleagues on papers to build their CVs) and "coffee time" agreements to approve each other's works.
Almost all grants, funding, pay, promotions and accolades are as a result of numbers of papers published. A far more useful statistic would be the number of citations, a measure of the work's usefulness.
As stunning as it is that most published papers are found to be false within five years, two other statistics are even more blunt: 50 per cent of publications are never read by anyone, and 95 per cent of peer-reviewed science is never cited, other than by the authors themselves.
In other words, most peer-reviewed published science is useless rubbish.
Jon Jenkins, Bogangar
I've often suspected that the quality of peer-reviewed science publications suffer from a 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' arrangement.
2 comments:
Hi Gordon,
Somewhere deep down in my pile of climate change papers I have an article done by an Australian several months ago on the the 50 or so researchers responsible for the IPCC findings on climate change.
Two points were made - the group was dominated by UK Hadley Centre scientists and Americans (but with 3 Australians as well) and few from anywhere else, and secondly they all had a record of peer reviewing one another's work.
Late addition: Here is a summary of the paper appearing in The Australian - http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24315169-7583,00.html
A lot of money is going to be spent by policy-makers chasing after this "consensus". It looks increasingly like the scientific equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage.
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