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.
