Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [113]
Take peer review, for example, today’s gold standard for scientific publishing. This procedure, where ideas and results are examined by suitably qualified scientists before being published, was not always a standard route to publication. The modern publication system evolved from exchanges of letters between scientists. If one scientist had something to say to another – it never used to be about letting everyone know – they would write them a letter. Eventually, as science grew and the letters needed to be distributed to more and more people, the practice of publishing letters for everyone to read was born.
At first, peer review was not part of this system. Einstein was certainly unused to peer review – in the latter part of his career, when peer review had started to become fashionable, he railed against having to modify a paper to meet the objections of his colleagues before he could publish it. ‘I see no reason to address the – in any case erroneous – comments of your anonymous expert,’ he wrote to the editor of The Physical Review, who had sent one of Einstein’s papers to an expert on general relativity. Einstein’s objection included a declaration that he had not expected it to be shown to anyone: he had sent the paper for publication. ‘On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere,’ he told the editor. And he did. The paper, ‘Do Gravitational Waves Exist?’, was unquestioningly accepted by another journal, and published complete with the mistake that the reviewer (but not Einstein) had spotted.
The famous Crick and Watson paper on the structure of DNA was also not peer-reviewed prior to publication; the editor of Nature, John Maddox, declared its correctness to be ‘self-evident’. At the time, the only kind of peer review carried out by Nature was done by a member of staff who would take submitted papers with him to the Athenaeum club and, over coffee or luncheon, ask other scientifically qualified members whether the ideas contained in the papers had any merit.
It was the growth in the numbers of professional scientists seeking publication that led to formal peer review becoming the norm. Faced with a barrage of submissions, the journal proprietors simply had to impose a filter. Today, journal editors receive papers from scientists, decide which ones look interesting, and send them out to two or three experts in the field. These experts decide – anonymously, to avoid unpleasantness – whether the papers merit publication. It seems like a sensible system, but only if you believe the misinformation about who scientists are, and how they behave. The fact is, peer review isn’t working too well – precisely because scientists are far too human.
Imagine that you are submitting a scientific paper for publication. It will be reviewed by the experts in your field: your competitors. They are not going to reject it just because it’s not their work; that would be far too obvious. But the temptations are there. If you have completed work that they are only halfway through, they will be tempted to delay your acceptance – perhaps subconsciously. If your work makes theirs redundant, it will be difficult for them to fall on their sword and admit defeat. If they just don’t like your approach, they will be tempted to pick holes in it – or create some. I have heard researchers moan, for instance, about a reviewer who couldn’t find flaws in their work, but told the journal editor that the work should be published only if accompanied by this disclaimer: ‘The most plausible explanation of these results is that they are somehow wrong.’
Even if reviewers are unbiased and objective, for the system to be effective they need to have the time and the inclination to examine papers thoroughly. Reviewers are humans under enormous pressure. They all know that they can’t just refuse to review their peers’ work – the journal editors know who they